I can live with that description.

Hi Eno- What I am saying is that to burn excess stored fat -- lose weight in our vernacular -- one must eat fewer calories than one expends. It is universal and proven. Now, I am not saying that many people don't eat more food on Atkins...many eat more volume than before. But if they are losing bodyfat, the caloric intake is still less than what they were eating previously. Dr. Atkins says this in his books...calories do count. Millions of people lose weight on high carb diets each year...they just do so with hunger, lean muscle loss, and severe restriction of foods (none of which we have to do, thanks to ketosis!).

The example of the guy in the 1972 book that ate 3000-3500 calories a day and still lost 100 pounds is a good case study. This guy was 360 pounds or so and went on Atkins and ate 2 pounds of meat a day, etc. He lost about a pound a day (including water), was in ketosis, did everything right on a high calorie diet. But what happened is that he went from 5,000 calories a day on high carb, to 3,500 calories a day on low carb and more food, and lost weight. While many of us eat more food on Atkins, the food adds up to fewer calories than our previous high carb diets. I have kept a running food journal both before and after and I went from about 4,000-5,500 calories a day pre-Atkins to about 3,000 calories a day on Atkins, while eating more or less an equal amount of food as before. I am losing a lot of weight. As I approach goal, I will have to reduce my calories in order to maintain weight loss. Numerous maintenance threads on this site will confirm this phenomenon.

But of course, everyone's weight loss experience is different, almost to the point of being mystical! That doesn't mean the same metabolic and thermodynamic principles that govern everything else aren't working the same for each of us...nobody is special in that sense!

3 years ago, someone on this forum showed us calculations to prove that the amount of energy lost due to exiting ketones through the urine is too small, but I discovered that there has been an error in his calculations and proved it to him. I don't remember anything about this subject now.

Everyone can tell for sure that whenever someone has diarrhea, the food he eats produces minimum energy since it passes without significant amount of digestion. In general, the term "burning food" does not mean getting a specific amount of calories from the food. How hard or how efficient food is burnt must be stated and this can change from day to day or even from hour to hour.

Google News had a link just now to a response by Dr. Ornish to the study. Following it I ended up at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17490143/site/newsweek/

The headline:
Why I Disagree With this Study
A new comparison of four diets—including mine—is misleading and riddled with problems.

The headline says a great deal about Dr. Ornish. He's functioning as an advocate, not as a scientist. First of all, scientists don't generally "disagree with studies." They often disagree with conclusions draw from studies. He doesn't like the conclusions that are rather obvious to draw, so he attacks the study. But he does not disagree with *all* of the study. For example, he cites the study as noting, as it does, that the difference in weight loss between the Ornish and Atkins groups was not statistically significant. Those who say that the study showed greater weight loss on Atkins than on Ornish are correct. It did. But Ornish is correct to note that the difference wasn't statistically significant.

But covered over in this confusion is the basic fact: low fat proponents have been claiming for years that low carb diets were ineffective and unsafe. Yet this has never been proven in any study, and indications from the studies that exist are that it may not be true. Including this study.

Is the study "riddled with problems". Well, that depends. If you think that the study showed that Atkins, followed according to recommendations, is better than Ornish, likewise followed according to recommendations, then, indeed, there is a problem, since the study was not designed to compare such groups.

Rather, the study strikes to a crucial point: what should public health authorities *recommend*? This study showed the effect of recommending (and educating) peope with regard to a particular diet. In that respect, recommending Atkins is shown by this study to be as good a recommendation as any of the other three, or better. And this is actually revolutionary. The conclusion of the study was not that Atkins is better than Ornish, so for Ornish to attack the study on the basis that it didn't prove that is entirely beside the point. The conclusion was that it was reasonable for physicians to recommend Atkins.

Here is a key paragraph from Ornish's rebuttal:


Note that Ornish twists the meaning of what he quoted. He contrasts, not the weight loss shown, but *statistical significance," which isn't what the authors claimed. (They found statistical significance only between Atkins and the Zone.) But that Atkins dieters *did* show greater weight loss is still interesting, and it merely emphasizes that the hypothesis that Atkins is *worse* than Ornish in this respect becomes relatively unlikely to be true. What was the "primary conclusion of the study"?



That Ornish disagrees with this accurate and sober statement simply shows bad science. Taubes got fired up when he noticed the ubiquity of bad science among the low-fat advocates. This is just one more example.

The point is that conclusion the authors drew in the study is exactly appropriate, given what they were studying. They did not extend their results to claim, for example, that there were no possible harmful effects in areas not studied from, say, the high saturated fat content in a typical Atkins diet. They did not claim that participants actually followed the Ornish diet, another point that Ornish attacks. Ornish is defending his diet, not considering whether or not *recommending* the other diets is also reasonable.

What the public needs is better science, and better analysis of science, and too many diet advocates have become far more interested in being right, that is, in trying to prove that they were right, than in expanding our knowledge.

For years, the low-fat people have taken weak studies with conclusions that clearly did not follow from what was actually studied, and have reported them as proving their ideas. But if a study comes out that even can be taken as hinting that perhaps these ideas are limited or incomplete or maybe even mistaken, they attack it on far weaker grounds. They strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Absolutely, those of us who have come to generally trust the Atkins diet could be wrong. There could be some long-term effect that we don't know about. Avoiding carbs is, in some sense, unnatural. We know that carbs are not necessary to human nutrition (unlike what is commonly assumed by opponents of low-carb diet, as if carbs were a necessary nutrient), but quite clearly we are adapted to eat them and to find them tasty.

But, given the state of our knowledge and what we know happens when it is recommended that people follow low-carb diets, particularly Atkins, and particularly with caution being recommended about, for example, fiber and vitamins, about not taking the diet as meaning one should just eat eggs and butter and steak and forget about vegetables -- which is not what Atkins recommends! --, it is quite reasonable to recommend Atkins as a diet, and there seems little reason to strongly discourage people from doing so.

There is a population for whom Atkins works spectacularly. This won't show, necessarily, in general studies of the kind in question, for compliance reasons, among others. Perhaps there are people for whom it does *not* work, quite simply. All this is extremely difficult to study, but the fact is that the status quo is that if you went on Atkins, your doctor was quite likely to tell you that (1) it won't work and if you lose some weight, it is just water, (2) you may drop dead from a heart attack. Quite simply, these ideas, which have been repeated over and over again in consulting rooms and in the media, are wrong. And it's about time that they get tossed.

I still read, in articles critical of low carb diets, that these diets are "high in cholesterol," as if the idea that cholesterol in the diet was harmful was still a viable one. It was a mistake, the mistake has been known as suchh for a long time, but it still persists. It's bad enough that saturated fat is considered unhealthy, per se (rather than unnatural trans fats, the confounding factor that caused the early studies to conclude that saturated fat was harmful), but the cholesterol claim, I think, isn't even particularly controversial any more. It's been rejected. You can eat eggs.

Unless, of course, you are allergic to them. In the end, diet is an individual thing, one size does not fit all.

But Atkins fits a whole lot more people than the low fat crowd has been willing to admit.

I wonder if the Ornish diet has ever come out ahead in a study that he didn't do himself? It seems like it always comes out at the tail end in these things.

BTW, Dr. Mike shreds the HDL garbage truck idea in his blog here:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/?p=231

What's funny is he's barking about this, but it's stated very clearly in the abstract - you don't have to "carefully" read the study - it's plain as day in the abstract:

"Results Weight loss was greater for women in the Atkins diet group compared with the other diet groups at 12 months, and mean 12-month weight loss was significantly different between the Atkins and Zone diets (P<.05).

Mean 12-month weight loss was as follows: Atkins, –4.7 kg (95% confidence interval [CI], –6.3 to –3.1 kg), Zone, –1.6 kg (95% CI, –2.8 to –0.4 kg), LEARN, –2.6 kg (–3.8 to –1.3 kg), and Ornish, –2.2 kg (–3.6 to –0.8 kg).

Weight loss was not statistically different among the Zone, LEARN, and Ornish groups.

At 12 months, secondary outcomes for the Atkins group were comparable with or more favorable than the other diet groups."

As Atkins came out better than LEARN, then Atkins must be much better than eDiets as LEARN was much better than eDiets.

A very small amount of "unused" energy has been shown to be excreted in breath and urine by individuals in ketosis. At highest levels, it could amount to no more than a few calories a day. One would have to hemmorhage ketones in order to make up significant calories.

Not to put too fine a point on it, diarrhea does NOT contain undigested food. Anything that exits your body has been fully broken down and digested by the body. Diarrhea has extra water and possibly salts due to the osmolality of the colon that changes during illness or trauma. No calories are expended via poop, unless one is in ketosis (miniscule) or there is illness such as diabetes, or blood loss.

After only 60 days on Atkins, my HDl increased 6% and my LDL dropped 50%. I am a believer in this eating plan. Going low carb never affected my metabolic parameters like this. The Ornish diet looks like hell to me...hunger and discomfort abound.

did you ever get the feeling your posts are invisible? what i, and others, and the long article a pasted, have been saying is that CHANGES IN THE MACRONUTRIENT CONTENT OF YOUR DIET ALONE ARE ENOUGH TO INCREASE ENERGY EXPENDITURE TO THE POINT THAT IT'S THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE TO LOSE WEIGHT WITHOUT A REDUCTION IN CALORIC INTAKE AND WITHOUT AN INCREASE IN PHYSICAL ACTIVITY. it has been observed in studies and plausible mechanisms have been identified.

almost the identical points i made about ornish's comments a few pages back. great minds must think alike!

The still valid point I am making is that, regardless of how the calories are burned (running a 10K, metabolic advantage, etc.), one must consume fewer calories than expending in order to lose. Theoretical pathways and plausible mechanisms described in scientifc journals are great. No doubt these pathways exist. No doubt that macronutrient intake independent of calories can alter substrate usage...I experienced this at about day 3 of Atkins. But I guarantee that if I -- or you -- consume 1 calorie above what is expended in any specified time frame -- regardless of why or how --, weight loss will not occur.

way to be obnoxious.

I thought this was interesting:

But the study isn't a fair comparison because by the end, few women were following any of the diets very strictly, critics argue, although those in the Atkins group came the closest.

The study "had a good concept and incredibly pathetic execution," said Zone diet creator Barry Sears.

"It's a lot easier to follow a diet that tells you to eat bacon and brie than to eat predominantly fruits and vegetables," said Dr. Dean Ornish, creator of the Ornish diet.


Well, like real life, adherence long term to any eating plan is difficult unless you adopt it as a full way of life. Buying chips for the kids while I low carb it is not a recipe for success.

It is also interesting that the other diet plan authors like Sears and Ornish don't use any scientific rebuttal...just anecdote and whining.

As for Ornish, it's not easier to eat bacon and brie over fruits and vegetables; the reason it is easier to go low carb is because hunger is practically removed from persons who don't cheat. Better satiety leads to better adherence.

A good next step would be to take the high-conformers...those who adopted each plan as a way of life, and follow them for another year to track outcomes.