Very odd lchf vs hclf study
 

https://examine.com/nutrition/high-carb-high-satiety/

This is the oddest diet study I have ever read. It was to test whether a LCHF or HCLF diet was more satiating. But there were only 2 days of testing with the 65 overweight people – low carb on one day and high carb on another. They claimed that the low carb diet was 30.1% carbohydrate, less than half of the high carb diet at 63.5% carbohydrate. But looking at the meal lists I can't see how they came up with that. Three of the four meals were ad libitum, with lunch capped at 800 calories.

It looks to me that on the low carb diet people could eat as much cornflakes, white bread, sugar, pizza, garlic bread, coleslaw (which is loaded with sugar), cookies, and chips as they wanted. Before I got used to the lchf diet I would have pigged out on this so-called lchf diet. It takes time to get the body used to eating differently. And besides, I just don't see the lchf day as being low in carbs even if the servings were limited. I would starve on that diet as there is little I can eat.

I'm not used to reading scientific articles like this, so maybe I'm reading it wrong; please set me straight if I am.

I don't have the patience to read the study but clearly the low carb diet is not really low carb. The differences seem minor, whole milk vs skim milk, thick sliced bread vs medium sliced bread. I couldn't find any info on who funded this silliness but I can't see how it could possibly prove anything. But of course I didn't really bother to read it. I only skimmed it and thought "how silly".

This is why you have to go beyond the titles of articles and look at actual studies. This is not a study of low carb diets as we understand them.

Jean

I haven't looked at this particular study so this is just a general observation. When I was looking at many studies in depth fifteen years ago I was amazed to discover just how few researchers every bothered to look into what a low-carb diet, such as Atkins, even was. Yet they would do a study specifically aimed at showing the poor effects of following low-carb diets such as Atkins by having patients on the "low-carb diet" eating 200 g of carbs instead of the U.S. RDA of 300 g a day. And, of course, it was their findings that would get all kinds of media coverage since debunking Atkins was all the rage back then.

It's very hard to find good quality research results that are unbiased and properly done.

There are lots of studies where people are fed some sort of single dish meal, say a stew, in a high and a low fat version, with attempts to make the stews indistinguishable. Because, double blind, right? Generally, people will eat similar amounts of the two stews, this is described as "failing to compensate for the fat calories." See the problem with that? Set things up, so that people can't distinguish between two foods which vary in calories, and then find it remarkable that they eat more calories with the higher calorie version....

There's a rat study where potato ships, high or low fat, are fed to the rats. Always feed them high fat, or always feed them low fat potato chips, and there's not much difference. But if you feed the animals low fat potato chips one day, high fat the next, and so on, they'll overeat. They'll fail to compensate for the fat, yes--because the low fat potato chips are mocked up to resemble the high fat ones. The low fat days set the animals up to over consume on the high fat days. A similar study was done with sugar and artificial sweetener. Sugar one day, artificial sweetener plus some sort of bulking agent to match the chows for calorie density the next--the animals got fatter this way than with just sugar, or just artificial sweetener every day. And again, the researchers explained this as the animals failing to compensate for the sugar calories.

It sort of makes sense that the animals would learn to eat enough of the low calorie chow to avoid discomfort of hunger. If you take away predictability--it makes sense that the lesson they'd learn is how much food predictably protects them from hunger--that hunger would be a stronger motivating force than the threat of feeling a little bit overfed sometimes.

Also, a lot of the studies take place over short terms; while it can take a week or two for us to gear up our enzymes and switch to fat burning. They end the study just as true low carb gets going!

And yeah, they will make "as low as 100 carbs a day" be the "low carb" version.

Study participants rated low fat meals as looking appealing but not so after they had to actually eat that tasteless skim milk, rubbery fat-stripped cheese, etc. So we learn fat makes foods taste better. Which isn't news. Also since these people were in all likelihood typical sugar burners and not fat-adapted, I wonder if anyone doing the research observed (likely not?) whether people consumed the right amount of carbs on each day to fuel their bodies with an appropriate amount of glucose to do the job regardless of fat content/overall calories, since fat likely wouldn't be of much use to a sugar-burner as energy when not adapted to utilize it. In other words, I wonder if these sugar-burning people may have consumed the "right" amount of carbohydrate on both days for their glucose needs irregardless of (not useful) fat content? Perhaps carbohydrate grams per day may have been approximately equal even though people would have to "overeat" carbohydrate-rich fattier foods on the, ahem, "low carbohydrate" day in order to obtain the amount of carbohydrate their bodies typically required utilizing dietary glucose for fuel than on the day foods contained a higher percentage of available carbohydrate/glucose? So that far less overall calorie consumption on those days was needed in order to meet their bodies' sugar-burning glucose needs? I have no idea and doubt the researchers even considered this, but I think it's an interesting question.

Yes, good point. There's actually a whole school of thought looking at this--a hypothesis that people eat to maintain their glycogen stores at an accustomed level, suggesting that people might eat less calories when a high carbohydrate food is also low in fat. This is usually looked at through a carbohydrate-positive lens, probably because the idea came up when the low fat craze was in full swing. But it makes as much sense to say that, even as a very low fat high carb food like a plain potato might not spark the appetite "excessively," a very low carb food might do the same--because, if appetite is geared to restoring glycogen levels, then why would a person overeat butter, or a fatty pork chop, if the carbs aren't along for the ride?