Just found this article on the UK Times website:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne...icle1466880.ece

This proves Atkins is best diet, say scientists
John Elliott

A SCIENTIFIC study into the controversial Atkins diet suggests that it can be one of the most effective ways for women to lose weight.

At the end of 12 months, overweight subjects on the Atkins regime had lost twice as much weight on average as women on three competing diets. Atkins minimises carbohydrates, such as bread and sugar, in favour of meat and other proteins.

However, amid increasing concern that its devotees miss out on vital nutrients, it has recently been supplanted by new regimes such as the GI diet, which consists of foods that release glucose slowly and evenly into the bloodstream.

This week, however, the study will say Atkins produced more weight loss with no signs of undesirable side-effects.

“So many people have been asking questions about diets for years. We think it’s time to give them some answers,” said Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine at Stanford University’s disease prevention research centre in California, who led the study.

“We have an epidemic of obesity that’s still on the rise, and the ideas of our best and brightest people haven’t been able to change that.”

In the study, 311 pre-meno-pausal, overweight women were asked to follow one of four regimes: the Atkins, Zone, Learn or Ornish diet. Each involve a different level of carbohydrate intake. The Atkins diet recommends the lowest level, the Zone diet a little more.

The Learn (Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitudes, Relationships and Nutrition) diet follows the American government’s recommendations for a diet low in fat and high in carbohydrates.

The Ornish diet is very high in carbohydrates and extremely low in fat.

After a year, the 77 women in the Atkins group lost an average 10lb — about twice as much as those on the Learn and Ornish diets. Women on the Zone lost an average of 3.5lb.

Women in the Atkins group also achieved larger reductions in body mass index, triglycerides and blood pressure — all signs of improved health.

Susan Jebb, head of nutrition and health research at the Medical Research Council, said the reason for Atkins’s success was that people found a diet that allowed high intakes of meat and fat easier to follow than other more spartan regimes.

In Britain, the Atkins diet reached its peak popularity around 2003 when a survey indicated that 3m people were on it. It was endorsed by celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston. Its popularity has since waned.

Has Atkins worked for you or are other diets better?

Have your say

The amounts of weight loss over a year's time are really low (10 pounds or less). Do you think they meant "per month"?

Anyway, it's good to see supporting studies.

Remember, that is an average, and after a year. Some people might have failed on the diet, others might have had less to lose.

Not many people on any diet actually stick to the "lifestyle". Ten pounds after a year for people who were probably 10 to 30 pounds over weight to begin with, is awesome.

I was thinking the same thing. The Atkins diet that I'm familiar with encourages the eating of more vegetables than most people ate before they even thought of Atkins (5 or 6 servings a day and that's at induction levels!).
Fruits? Yup, even during induction. Of course, they aren't the type of things that most people (even dieticians, it seems) think of as fruits, but tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, olives and avocados are all botanical fruits and are permitted during induction.

Good to see low carb getting some positive press, though.

Great point!

Here's a link to the abstract: http://nutrition.stanford.edu/pdfs/AZ_abstract.pdf

And Stanford's press release http://nutrition.stanford.edu/pdfs/AZ_press.pdf
STANFORD, Calif. — The case for low-carbohydrate diets is gaining weight. Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have completed the largest and longest-ever comparison of four popular diets, and the lowest-carbohydrate Atkins diet came out on top.

Of the more than 300 women in the study, those randomly assigned to follow the Atkins diet for a year not only lost more weight than the other participants, but also experienced the most benefits in terms of cholesterol and blood pressure.

“Many health professionals, including us, have either dismissed the value of very-low-carbohydrate diets for weight loss or been very skeptical of them,” said lead researcher Christopher Gardner, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “But it seems to be a viable alternative for dieters.”

The results will be published in the March 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The 311 pre-menopausal, non-diabetic, overweight women in the study were randomly assigned to follow either the Atkins, Zone, LEARN or Ornish diet. Researchers chose the four diets to represent the full spectrum of low- to high-carbohydrate diets.

The Atkins diet, popularized by the 2001 republication of Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, represents the lowest carbohydrate diet. The Zone diet, also low-carbohydrate, focuses on a 40:30:30 ratio of carbohydrates to protein to fat, a balance said to minimize fat storage and hunger. The LEARN (Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitudes, Relationships and Nutrition) diet follows national guidelines reflected in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid—low in fat and high in carbohydrates. The Ornish diet, based on bestseller Eat More, Weigh Less by Dean Ornish, is very high in carbohydrates and extremely low in fat.

Study participants in all four groups attended weekly diet classes for the first eight weeks of the study and each received a book outlining the specific diet to which they were assigned. For the remaining 10 months of the study, the women’s weight and metabolism were regularly checked, and random phone calls monitored what they were eating.

One of the strengths of the $2 million study was that this setup mimicked real-world conditions, Gardner said. Women in the study had to prepare or buy all their own meals, and not everyone followed the diets exactly as the books laid out, just as in real life.

At the end of a year, the 77 women assigned to the Atkins group had lost an average of 10.4 pounds. Those assigned to LEARN lost 5.7 pounds, the Ornish followers lost 4.8 pounds and women on the Zone lost 3.5 pounds, on average. In all four groups, however, some participants lost up to 30 pounds.

After 12 months, women following the Atkins diet, relative to at least one of the other groups, had larger decreases in body mass index, triglycerides and blood pressure; their high-density lipoprotein, the good kind of cholesterol, increased more than the women on the other diets.

Gardner has several ideas for why the Atkins diet had the overall best results. The first is the simplicity of the diet. “It’s a very simple message,” he said. “Get rid of all refined carbohydrates to lose weight.” This message directly targets a major concern with the American diet right now—the increasing consumption of refined sugars in many forms, such as high-fructose corn syrup.

Beyond pinpointing this high sugar intake, the Atkins diet does the best at encouraging people to drink more water, said Gardner. And when people replace sweetened beverages with water, they don’t generally eat more food; they simply consume fewer calories over the course of the day.

The third theory Gardner offered as to why the Atkins diet was more successful is that it is not just a low-carbohydrate diet, but also a higher protein diet. “Protein is more satiating than carbohydrates or fats, which may have helped those in the Atkins group to eat less without feeling hungry,” he said.

Although the Atkins group led in terms of the average number of pounds lost, this group also gained back more weight in the second half of the study than those in the three other groups. Gardner also noted that the women in the Atkins group had lost an average of almost 13 pounds after six months, but ended the one-year period with a final overall average loss of 10 pounds.

Though critics of low-carbohydrate diets say that such diets can lead to health problems, none of the factors measured in this study was worse for the Atkins group. Gardner cautions, however, that there are potential long-term health problems that could not have been identified in a 12-month study. Also, several basic vitamins and minerals can be difficult to get in adequate amounts from a very-low-carbohydrate diet.

In the long run, Gardner hopes to use the large data set generated in this study to investigate why different diets might work better for different people. “We’re trying to see if we can learn more about the factors that predict success and failure with weight loss,” he said.

Regardless of what new insights are revealed, Gardner said the message he hopes people take from the study is the importance of eliminating from their diet, as much as possible, refined carbohydrates such as white bread and soda.

Gardner’s co-authors were Alexandre Kiazand, MD, postdoctoral scholar; Sofiya Alhassan, PhD, postdoctoral scholar; Soowon Kim, PhD, data analyst; Randall Stafford, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine; Raymond Balise, PhD, statistical programmer; Helena Kraemer, PhD, professor of biostatistics; and Abby King, PhD, professor of health research and policy and of medicine. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, and a grant from the Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan.

I believe that there is a cause for the current obesity epidemic and that there will be no permanent cure for obesity untill that cause is discovered. However, I agree that Atkins diet is the only diet which can stabilize your weight with minimum suffering until that cure is found.

Unfortunately, in contradistinction to what some in Atkins-land espouse, the cause of obesity is eating more calories than you burn. Period, end of story. Now, the reasons for eating more calories than we burn are multicausal, but we can probably start with affluence, sedentary lifestyles, fast food in poor neighborhoods, loss of PE in schools, poor dietary choices made by working adults, advertising, and addicition/emotional disorders, to name a few. Fix those problems and the Nobel is yours. Shoot, the world is yours.

The "permanent cure" is to eat less calories than one needs to maintain current body weight. Which, during the past 60 days of working the Atkins program, I have been able to achieve. It's the best metabolic advantage one can have.

Glad this article is coming out, it is another tool in the toolbox for physicians.

Sorry, although I agree that eating more calories than you burn is the direct cause, but we can't end the story here.

The human body contains a self regulation mechanism which - if functioning properly - knows how to maintain a constant weight. You cannot eat unless your body allows you to. Even if you could force yourself to eat and keep doing that for a long time, your body have other means to stabilize your weight. It can raise your metabolic rate, it pass food without complete digestion and it can even make you thraw-up if necessary.

You are mentioning set point theory. Our bodies tend to stabilize towards a specific weight. IF WE ARE NORMAL. I, however, have quite an abnormal food intake pattern. I can eat when my body tells me no. I have no such mechanism...hence morbid obesity exists for me and countless others. There are hundreds of ways to burn weight and our bodies adapt and adjust depending on the types of foods we eat...nobody disputes that. But we can't burn calories that aren't there to burn -- out of thin air -- so what we eat gets burned and the rest, if there is a deficit, comes from our bodies.

You are incorrect. Millions of Atkins dieters have proved that incorrect. I hope that you soon start listening.

I'm an Atkins believer, as I have lost 50+ pounds on the plan. Your claim is unsupported by the facts and unsubstantiated in any literature. The reason anyone loses weight on atkins is because they consume fewer calories than they burn. We may burn it by a variety of mechanisms, but we still burn more than we eat, hence weight loss. The burden of proof is on you to prove your claim; there is 200 years of medical research to back up my claim.

You are completely full of BS. I don't know what weak people you usually beat up, pick on, and lie to -- but it will not work here.

The facts are -- many Atkins people lose weight and improve their health by eating more calories - but simply change what they eat. The facts are - by simply changing your nutrition changes an awful lot about your health.

Are you trying to tell me that in the last 20 years -- as people moved away from whole, natural (unprocessed) foods -- that have to be cooked -- that our health has gotten better?

Other countries use to make fun of us. Now that they have adopted our eating of high glycemic foods out of a box, bag, or other wrapper -- what has happened to their health?

Are you trying to tell all of us that ate more and lost weight and improved weight -- did not really do it? Are you calling millions of us liars?

Low carb research goes back over 100 years.

Please start thinking.

Actually it's only the beginning of the story elpasopop. Firstly because a low carb dietary approach will also cause a human body to burn more calories per calorie consumed. And secondly, and IMHO far more importantly, the hormonal environment engendered by low carb will lead to many of the 'excess to energy demands' calories consumed being merely excreted. I wish more bench scientists would start analyzing the energy content of human urine under different macronutrient ratios. It seems a pretty obvious place to start looking for the explanation of why 'eating more calories than you burn' is a hopelessly simplistic and inadequate explanation of obesity.... or the lack of it

That is the most insulting, ridiculous, illogical thing I've ever read. Gee, I better start getting my HDL down or I'm going to die of a heart attack.
Is torcetrapib made from butter? Unbelievable how this guy twists words to suggest that "not everything that raises HDL is good".
The man obviously needs a steak.

Anecdotal at best, but I gained 30 pounds on a 1500 calorie/day diet.
I now maintain exactly the same weight (and have for 3 years) eating at least 2,000 calories/day. It has nothing to do with calories and everything to do with where those calories come from.
I believe in "energy in/energy out" when it comes to cars and gasoline, but not when it comes to Humans.