Dieters looking for tricks to lose weight are getting more bad news with the publication of a study showing diets that restrict certain food groups do not take any extra weight off.

But adding whole grains may help, another study showed.

A study of 80 overweight or obese people showed that they all lost the same amount of weight regardless of whether they were on an extra low-fat diet or one targeted at the so-called glycemic index, which aim to cut foods that affect insulin.

"Despite all the controversy about diet ... a calorie is a calorie is a calorie," said Dr. Ernst Schaefer of Tufts University in Boston, who led the study.

"No matter how you lose weight, you lose the same amount of weight," added Dr. Robert Eckel of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and president-elect of the American Heart Association.

The Heart Association has stuck with its recommendations that weight loss requires a boring but effective approach -- eating less, exercising more, and basing the diet on vegetables, fruits, whole grains and little fat or meat.

But the group regularly supports research aimed at seeing if there may indeed be quicker ways to weight loss, because losing weight is one of the best ways to prevent heart disease -- the No. 1 cause of death in the United States and much of the rest of the world.

Schaefer told a meeting of the heart association that he put his 80 volunteers, with an average age of 54, on various carefully controlled diets for three months.

One diet got 15 percent of calories from fat, another was closer to the U.S. average with 30 percent of calories from fat and another had a low glycemic index.

All the dieters cut their usual intake by about a third, but they could ask for snacks.

After the first three months they were told to stay on their diets but were not watched so carefully, and followed for a year.

LOST ABOUT 17 POUNDS

All the dieters lost 6 percent to 8 percent of body weight, and all improved their cholesterol levels, Schaefer told the heart meeting in New Orleans.

"The average weight loss was 7 kg to 8 kg or about 17 pounds," he said.

But the low-glycemic diet was harder to follow, he said.

"People have to really track what they are eating," Schaefer told a news conference.

The theory behind diets to control glycemic index is that some foods affect the ability to process sugar more than others. "It is not as simple as one might think," Schaefer said.

"For example, high glycemic index foods are a baked potato, French fries." An apple would be a low glycemic index food, he said. White bread and processed sugar have a high glycemic index while whole grains have a low glycemic index.

"For weight, exercise and calories are critical but for heart disease I believe animal fat and sugar are the culprits," Schaefer added.

A second study, published on Tuesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that people who added whole grains such as whole oats and whole-wheat bread to their diets lost more weight.

Pauline Koh-Banerjee and colleagues from the University of Tennessee and the Harvard School of Public Health studied 27,000 men and found the more whole grains they ate, the more weight they lost while dieting.

They said fiber in the diet may fill people up faster than processed grains and perhaps by helping to regulate blood sugar levels. "Moreover, because of their high fiber and water content, whole-grain foods contain fewer calories gram-for-gram than does (the same) amount of corresponding refined-grain food," they wrote.

Reference Source 89
November 10, 2004

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".