Where have previous weight-loss diets gone wrong?
For much of the last half-century, the most common approach to preventing and treating obesity has been a low-fat diet. It seemed to make sense: if you don’t want fat on your body, don’t put fat into your body. The problem is that it didn’t work. Recent research from our group and others has shown that the relative amount of fat in the diet isn’t an important determinant of body weight. And low-fat diets have been notoriously unsuccessful. In the past five years, the pendulum has swung very far in the other direction, with the enormous popularity of the Atkins-type, very low carbohydrate diets. These diets do produce significant weight loss for a few months. However, studies show that by one year, much of the weight is regained. How long can one go on eating bacon double-cheeseburgers, hold the bun? The basic problem with many diets is that they lack an accurate understanding of how food affects our hormones and metabolism, and ultimately our well-being. Diets that restrict an entire c
