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Diet and Weight Loss

Popular Diets: What's the Best Approach?

Summary & Participants

Low-fat vs. low-carb. The battle lines are drawn. But which is the best diet for losing weight? Learn how to tell one diet from another and how to cut through the hype.

Medically Reviewed On: June 11, 2008

Webcast Transcript

SAMUEL KLEIN, MD: Obesity is a major public health problem in this country, and maybe the most important health problem that we're facing today. Two-thirds of adult Americans, are overweight or obese.

ANNOUNCER: That translates to a lot of Americans with a weight problem. For those wanting to lose pounds, there's no shortage of advice, or possible diets. But how's a person to know which diet is best?

BETH TAYLOR: If the diet is promising them that they'll lose seven pounds a week, it's probably not a real safe diet. Most Americans that start a weight loss diet will lose anywhere from like one to three pounds a week, maybe a little but more the first couple weeks as they're body fluid status kind of adjusts to the diet. And after that, between one and three pounds a week is a good, safe way to weight loss and, if that's what the diet promises, it's probably a pretty sound diet.

ANNOUNCER: Most of mainstream diets fall into four categories.

SAMUEL KLEIN, MD: The conventional, traditional approach is consuming a low-fat diet, and also now, more recently, a low-energy-dense diet, which means you have lower amounts of calories per weight of food. Fruits and vegetables, for example, have a lot of water content, are low-energy-dense foods, whereas foods that are very dry, like pretzels and crackers, or foods that have a lot of fat, like cheese, are high-energy-dense foods.

And then there's the recent popularity of the low-carbohydrate diet approaches. And then we also have diets that might be very low in fat, a typical Pritikin or Dean Ornish kind of diet, that have extreme restrictions on dietary fat intake.

ANNOUNCER: Many claims have been made recently that the low-carbohydrate diets can outperform traditional low fat diets.

BETH TAYLOR: So the high-protein diets that are popular right now, high-protein with either low-carb or moderate-carb. Some know them as the Atkins diet, that type of thing, or South Beach diet. One of the reasons those are probably popular is, by increasing your protein, for a lot of people, that helps with satiety or a sense of fullness, so that you're not as hungry all day long.

ANNOUNCER: What does the research show? It depends on the timeframe of the study.

SAMUEL KLEIN, MD: There have been recent, well-done research studies that have demonstrated that the Atkins diet generates greater weight loss at six months than a more conventional, traditional low-fat dietary approach.

ANNOUNCER: But longer-term data shows different results.

SAMUEL KLEIN, MD: But these have been short-term studies, six months long, and one study that went on for one year suggests that both groups have the same amount of weight loss at the end of one year because of the marked weight regain in the Atkins diet subjects.

ANNOUNCER: So what's a heavy person to do?

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