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Losing Weight: Low-fat foods won’t help |
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Written by Jessica Smith
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Monday, 10 August 2009 |
If you want to lose weight, forget eating a low-fat diet. Low-fat
foods, which achieve billions of dollars of sales every year, will help
you lose some weight – but it’s nothing compared to other diets, a
major new study has discovered.
The Atkins low-carb diet is the most effective way to lose weight,
and it is followed closely by a balanced Mediterranean diet. A low-fat
diet came in a poor third, and people who used it lost around 40 per
cent less weight than those who were on the Atkins regime.
Researchers
from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel put 322 people
who were moderately obese on one of the three weight-losing approaches,
and monitored their progress for two years.
At the end of the
study, those on a low-fat diet had lost an average of 3.3 kg, while
those eating a Mediterranean diet lost 4.6 kg and the Atkins diet
achieved an average weight loss of 5.5 kg.
The Atkins diet was also the most effective for lowering the ‘bad’ HDL cholesterol, which fell by 20 per cent over the two years
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