The Best Diet For Weight Loss

If you want to lose weight, you eat more fat. And this isn't really that new. This dates back to at least 2007 as published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Let's have a look. So this is the famous A to Z Study. It's a 12 month randomized trial of 311 overweight or obese premenopausal non-diabetic women. And again, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They looked at four different diets: the popular Atkins Diet, which is really low carb, the traditional American diet that we still hear recommendations for, which is a low-fat, high-carb diet. The Ornish Plan, which is a very high carbohydrate diet, and finally the Zone Diet, which is somewhat of a low-carbohydrate diet. But for our purposes in this video I'd like to just compare the Atkins Diet and the Ornish Diet, because they represent the extremes.

Atkins Diet gets 44 percent of it's calories from fat, as opposed to a much significant reduction of carbohydrates down to 34 percent. And that's just exactly opposite, pretty much, of what the Ornish plan recommends. As you will recall the Ornish Diet is one that's low in fat and high in carbs. So let's compare the Atkins program to the Ornish program in terms of what the Journal of the American
Medical Association has to say.

Well the Atkins Diet gives you a lot more saturated fat in terms of grams per day:
27 versus 17 for the Ornish Diet. Now the body mass index on the Atkins diet went down by 1.65. That's a measurement basically of how fat you are. On the Ornish Diet, not anywhere near a significant reduction in comparison to the Atkins Diet. The percentage body fat down by about 3 percent eating more fat and half that amount on the Ornish plan.

Triglycerides, a powerful marker for risk for heart disease, reduced by close to 30 points by eating more fat on the Atkins program, and about half that on the Ornish program that tells you to go on a low-fat diet. HDL, or good cholesterol, increases on the Atkins Diet by about 5 points, no change on the low-fat Ornish program. LDL, or so called bad cholesterol, goes down on the Ornish program, for sure, and not much change on the Atkins program.

What about fasting glucose, which we know is significantly related to risks for Alzheimers Disease, down almost 2 points on the Atkins program, and down by about less than one point on Ornish.
Blood pressure goes down significantly eating more fat, and even the bottom number, the diastolic, goes down significantly more eating more fat on the Atkins program. And as you see here, the Atkins program is a diet that favors much more fat and a significant reduction in carbohydrates, in comparison to what so called US experts recommend, which is a diet that is much higher in carbohydrates.

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and this dates back to 2007, the A to Z Trial clearly indicates that when we increase our consumption of good fats, and dramatically reduce our consumption of carbohydrates, a variety of cardiovascular risk factors improve in favor of the high-fat diet, and you'll even lose more weight.