Word: carbs
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Across the aisle from the usual sugar-laden fare in 7-Eleven sits the latest confection to join the Atkins diet craze, a high-tech chocolate bar called Z-Carb. The Z is short for zero--as in "Zero Carbs, Zero Guilt, Zero Laxative Effect"--but we'll get to that last bit later. A Z-Carb is half the size of a Milky Way and twice as expensive and, if the history of dietary snack substitutes is any guide, ought to taste like a Post-it note, only blander. Not so. This is a no-sugar, no-carbohydrate treat...
...some level, most of us figure the low-carb message has to be too good to be true. Certainly that's what we've heard over and over from the medical and nutritional establishments, which still maintain that the healthiest way to lose weight is to adopt a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. But Atkins, who died earlier this year after a fall, may yet get the last laugh. Two new studies in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest that there may be more health benefits to a low-carb diet than mainstream researchers had previously thought possible...
...results are preliminary but nevertheless intriguing. In both studies, test subjects who followed a low-carb diet lost at least twice as much weight as those on a conventional high-carb, low-fat diet after six months. Even at that, the average weight loss for the low-carb dieters, all of whom were obese, was a modest 13 lbs. in the first NEJM study and 15 lbs. in the second. Forty percent of the subjects dropped out of the experiments before completing them. Both studies also showed that the Atkins-style diet boosted the levels of high-density lipoprotein...
...reach for those pork rinds just yet. While the new studies showed an initial benefit, the advantages gradually disappeared over the long term. After a year, folks on the low-carb diet had regained much more weight than those on low-fat diets. And as Dr. Dean Ornish--on the opposite side of many a debate with Atkins--points out, you would expect HDL levels to go up with a low-carb diet, since HDL acts as a kind of dump truck for scavenging fatty compounds. It will also take years to determine whether low-carb diets--which stint...
...studies, most health professionals, including me, still won't feel comfortable recommending an Atkins-style diet. Good health consists of more than a few positive numbers on a blood test or a bathroom scale. There are just too many unknowns about the long-term impact of a low-carb diet on your health...