Inroduction
The first thing that I'm sure you'll say is that this is a month in total it's too short and of course, this is a short trial but this comes down to study design they're not looking for prevention of stroke or heart attack risk. This wasn't designed to do that, it wasn't powered to do that. You need thousands of people over many years to establish that kind of thing and you obviously can't lock people in a room to do that. For a long period of time, the prime outcome for this study was to measure energy and macronutrient intake with a bunch of secondary endpoints like measuring insulin and blood glucose.
What was the thinking behind this?
Well, the central ethos to low carb diets which is the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity was kind of the inspiration for this. We know that um insulin we've known this for decades has a very important role in how fat is laid down and how it's used up. And we know that insulin levels go up when you eat more carbohydrates. So carbohydrates cause insulin release and the thinking is that insulin causes fat storage so the level of circulating fuels in your blood decreases and this tells your body to eat more and to deposit fat. And moreover, you use less energy and this is the idea behind low carb diets which remember haven't we have been around for a long time since the 70s. Also, it's important to remember that this theory was counterintuitive to the commonly beheld uh hell theory which still a lot of people believe. Now that it is just purely about total calories in and calories out and it doesn't really matter what the constituents are.
Keto Diet
So the carbohydrate-insulin model challenged that simplistic belief I do apologize for the wind the study in hand randomized participants to either 14 days low carb or 14 days low fat and then switched them over. They were all non-diabetic participants, they had an average age of around 30 and an average BMI of about 28 so they were overweight. The low-carb food was consistent with keto meals it was animal-based with non-starchy vegetables i.e things like greens and the low-fat . one was consistent with a plant-based vegan healthy diet. Again with non-starchy vegetables alongside things like sweet potato and so forth as expected the insulin and blood glucose levels were significantly higher in the plant-based group versus the keto group.
Blood ketones were higher in the keto group so far nothing new nothing that surprising so why am I telling you about this trial because people ate significantly less on the plant-based diet right. From the beginning and even with the documented high insulin levels which should we would think would tell them to eat more. They ended up eating less and they actually consumed about 700 calories less per day and quite strikingly this was seen in every single participant. There was no noise that it was every single participant from day one and this is simply because of plant-based diets.
Plant-Based Diet
Plant-based foods are just lower in calories per gram so you feel full and you've eaten fewer calories and there were no differences in hunger fullness satisfaction eating capacity and interestingly things like familiarity and enjoyment. Were also the same as well which is part of the selection criteria they didn't choose fussy eaters and they chose people who would be familiar with most of the food that they were presented with. So with the low lower caloric intake of the plant-based diet, people lost more body fat, not on the keto.
One they lost more water weight on the keto diet which is a recognized phenomenon that occurs early on and this is to do with glycolysis activation mobilizing water. But body fat was not significantly reduced with the keto diet overall in spite of the keto group eating 700 more calories per day. They lost more weight overall but I reiterate this was not body fat weight loss so should we chuck out the carbohydrate-insulin model like a tub of e-number enriched margarine. Well, a lot of people think we should, and is the effects on insulin and glucose in the keto diet and the lower levels of particular interest and importance to metabolic health and diabetics.
Probably yes is a healthy plant-based diet a good starting place for good weight loss, I think it probably is as I said at the start the most tire something to people who aren't staunchly in one of the different camps is the endless arguments that assume that life is binary and you can only do one diet or the other. And you can't possibly be flexible in your choices but can't we all just get along because there is actually some common ground here.
Vegan vs Keto
Keto and plant-based diets might seem a world apart but are they really they both emphasize moving away from the standard American diet which we all know is awful that's the overwhelming message that emerges from a multitude of trials including work by this same group. That we can argue to the vegan cows come home about all the different macros and ketones and so on. But the ultra-processed foods like ready meals and cookies and crisps frankly.
Foods with long lists of additives refined carbs salt and so on they're the real problem I read somewhere. Don't quote me on this, but something like two-thirds of the American diet comes from ultra-processed foods compared to about five percent in Portugal and eight percent in France. I think the UK was somewhere in the middle around 30. So this trial is an important extra data point by all means to criticize the duration, but people complaining about the sample size are missing the point here both groups lost weight.
Conclusion
So instead of fighting between belligerent camps or more importantly instead of berating yourself for not sticking to a certain diet and messing up your ketosis or you know being unable to stick to a diet. that your friend Karen promises you are the best one just try one intervention first. And that's cutting your intake from highly processed foods down to as close to zero as you can and I appreciate that the term highly processed is also confusing and that needs a bit of clarification as well but whenever people talk about the healthiest populations in the world. In Italy or Japan, none of them are doing extremely restrictive diet and there's little in common between a lot of these places in terms of what they're actually putting in their food except there's one thing that is in common they are mostly natural good unprocessed foods.
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