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Four
Popular Diets All Work Well
No matter what diet you
are on, if you eat less and lose weight you also lower your risk
of heart disease, doctors stated at a conference.
Weight Watchers, the high-fat Atkins
diet, the extremely low-fat Ornish diet and the high-protein,
moderate carbohydrate Zone diet all help people lose weight and
all reduce cholesterol, but in different ways, the researchers
said.
"On average, participants in the
study reduced their heart disease risk by 5 percent to 15 percent,"
Dr. Michael Dansinger of Tufts University in Boston told a meeting
of the American Heart Association.
"Instead of saying there is one
clear winner here, we are saying they are all winners."
And, as might be expected, the
closer dieters followed the plans, the more weight they lost.
Those who stuck it out for a full
year lost, on average, 5 percent of their body weight -- or about
10 to 12 pounds.
While the dieters reduced heart
disease "risk factors" such as cholesterol levels, overall blood
pressure did not drop much and the study did not last long enough
to see if this translated into a lower long-term risk of heart
disease.
Instead, the researchers used statistics
that show lowering cholesterol by a certain amount, for instance,
reduces the risk of heart disease overall.
Dr. Robert Eckel of the University
of Colorado, who heads the Heart Association's nutrition committee,
said the message is clear -- lose weight however you can to reduce
your risk of heart disease.
WEIGHT REDUCTION
"I think weight reduction trumps
a lot of other stuff," Eckel said.
For the study Dansinger and colleagues
chose 160 overweight people and randomly assigned 40 to each of
four different diets. They weighed an average 220 pounds (100
kg) and needed to lose between 30 and 80 pounds.
All agreed to follow the diets
to the best of their ability for two months, although none were
enrolled in the full programs that Weight Watchers and Dr. Dean
Ornish advocate.
They include exercise, group meetings
and food diaries for Weight Watchers and stress reduction for
the Ornish diet.
After two months 22 percent of
the dieters had given up. After a year, 35 percent dropped out
of Weight Watchers and the Zone diets and 50 percent had quit
the Atkins and Ornish plans.
Dansinger and other researchers
said the study suggested there is no one-size-fits-all diet best
for everyone.
"The type of person who is going
to go for a low-fat, vegetarian diet is not, in my experience,
the kind of person who is going to go for a high-meat diet," Dansinger
said.
But for people with high cholesterol
levels, the Ornish diet might be the most beneficial, Dansinger
said.
"The Ornish diet, low-fat vegetarian,
was best for lowering the bad LDL cholesterol, while other diets
were better at raising the good HDL cholesterol," Dansinger said.
Low density lipoprotein cholesterol is the stuff that clogs arteries,
while high density lipoprotein carries fat out of the blood.
"Atkins reduced LDL 8.6 percent,
Zone 6.7 percent, Weight Watchers 7.7 percent and Ornish 16.7
percent," Dansinger said in a statement afterwards. He said the
Atkins and Zone diets diet raised HDL by about 15 percent, Weight
Watchers by 18.5 percent, and Ornish by 2.2 percent.
Ornish said doctors often place
too high a value on high HDL levels. "If you reduce fat, there
is less garbage, less saturated fat and cholesterol, so your body
needs less garbage trucks," he said.
But Dansinger said his study was
one of several that has suggested the high-fat Atkins diet, in
the short-term, does not raise the risk of heart disease.
Reference
Source 89
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