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STEVE LISS FOR TIME
NO PAIN, NO GAIN: Whatever the diet, exercise helps weight loss
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| Cracking The Fat Riddle |
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Should you count calories or carbs? Is dietary fat your biggest enemy? The latest research may surprise you |
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By J. MADELEINE NASH |
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Posted Sunday, June 29, 2003; 14:08BST
Until he hit his fifties, Martin Andrew ran 16 km every evening, played cricket every week and maintained a steady weight of 81 kg. Then the buildings-conservation officer from Haddenham, England, hurt his back, stopped running and found his cricket trousers no longer fit. After five years of feeling fed up with his double chin and the extra 12 kg he had put on — and frustrated that low-calorie diets just left him hungry and no slimmer — he went on the Atkins diet, the famous weight-loss program that seems to defy nutritional wisdom. Most health experts advise you to favor carbohydrates, found in everything from fruits to grains, while going easy on the protein and fat. On the Atkins diet, you are allowed to eat all the protein- and fat-drenched meat and butter you want but must cut out cereal and bread. Andrew is happy to stick with a regime "that allows me to eat strawberries and cream." And he's even happier that after just two months on the diet, he's lost nearly 13 kg. He's even playing cricket again. "It's a very easy diet to follow because it is so obvious what you shouldn't be eating," he says. "But it's slightly surprising how many carbohydrates there are in things. You can eat your entire daily ration in one apple."
Dr. Robert Atkins, who died in April from head injuries sustained during a fall, first formulated his weight-loss plan 30 years ago. It slips in and out of favor every few years, persistently bucking the skepticism of mainstream nutritionists. Could it really be, as Atkins argued, that low-fat diets, which are typically high in carbohydrates, are bad and that low-carbohydrate diets, which often contain considerable fat, are good? Is it really O.K., as Atkins advocated, to slather mayonnaise all over salmon and tuna and douse asparagus and lobster with butter while friends look on in envy? Shades of the 1973 movie Sleeper, in which Woody Allen plays a 20th century Rip Van Winkle who awakens after a couple hundred years to a world in which fatty delights like steak and cream pies are deemed beneficial to your health. Alas, Sleeper was and is a fantasy. The indictment of excessive amounts of saturated fat — the kind found in steaks and butter — as a major contributor to heart disease and stroke has not changed and seems unlikely to do so. A formidable lineup of experts holds to the low-fat approach, none more tenaciously than Dr. Dean Ornish, whose regimen prescribes no more than 10% of daily calories from fat. But there are hints now that Atkins may have struck a vein of truth. Two studies reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in May showed that people on the Atkins diet lost more weight than others on conventional diets — without suffering any damaging nutritional deficiencies. One study, by the University of Pennsylvania's Weight and Eating Disorders Program, took 63 men and women in their forties with an average weight of 97 kg and put half on the Atkins diet and the rest on a low-calorie regime. After three months, the Atkins group had lost an average 6.6 kg against the others' 2.6 kg. The other study, by the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Center, put 132 obese men and women — over 127 kg — on either low-carb or low-fat diets and found that the low-carb group lost around twice as much as the low-fat group. What was perhaps more interesting — even baffling — was that the group on the Atkins low-carb diet showed lower levels of the blood lipids that contribute to arterial disease.
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