Pick heart healthy diet to stay fit

Boston, February 28: Which is the most effective diet for weight loss? Low fat, low carb or high protein? A new study conducted by Preventing Overweight Using Novel Dietary Strategies (POUNDS LOST) found that picking up any heart-healthy diet and sticking to it is the best way to lose weight.

The findings, which are published in Thursdays’ New England Journal of Medicine, found that as long as a diet reduced the calorie intake, it would lead to weight loss, regardless of the diet's proportions of fat, protein, or carbohydrate.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Frank Sacks, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, said, "We have a really simple and practical message for people: it's not so much the type of diet you eat. It's how much you put in your mouth."

In the POUNDS LOST study, researchers looked at the diets of 811 overweight and obese men and women from Massachusetts and Louisiana in between the ages of 30 to 70 years. The participants were randomly assigned one of four different styles of calorie-controlled diets: low fat or high fat, with either average or high levels of protein. All were also heart healthy as they were high in fiber and low in cholesterol and saturated fat.

All subjects were asked to engage in ninety minutes of moderate exercise every week and had diet counseling. The researchers found that everyone lost the same amount of weight.

On average, subjects lost 13 lb. (5.9 kilos) after six months of dieting (7 percent), and maintained a 9 pound loss (four-kilo) and a two-inch drop in waist size after two years.

Co-author of the study, Elizabeth G. Nabel, director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) was excited about the results. She said, “People do have to choose heart-healthy foods," but she added, "I think the beauty of the study is that they have a lot of flexibility in terms of the dietary approach."

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 66 percent of American adults are overweight and of those, 32 percent are obese.

The current study was conducted by scientists at the Harvard University School of Public Health, Boston and at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, La, and funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health.