Ever since the Atkins diet made its debut, it has been the focus of criticism in the way it promotes weight loss. That criticism comes from the diet plan’s low carb-high fat way to lose weight. While many Atkins dieters always lose the most weight in the first several months, rumor has always been that in the end, they gain it all back. The fact that eating sausage, bacon and other fatty foods may sound like a dieters dream, those in the medical field wondered its long term effects on the body. Now a year long study done by Stanford University reports that the Atkins diet may be the better diet after all…or is it?
By the end of the year long study Atkins dieters were shown to have lost more weight overall than the other three diet plans involved; the Zone, Dean Ornish’s Lifestyle Program and LEARN (a diet that many physicians recommend). The Atkins participants also had a significant drop in triglycerides, their blood pressure dropped and they had an increase in high-density lipoprotein (protective cholesterol). Most importantly they didn’t show an increase in their levels of low-density lipoprotein, something that many medical professionals felt was associated with a diet high in saturated fat and cholesterol.
The ultimate goal of the study was to find out if dieters would be able to follow a diet by simply following its plan in a book. While that may have been the main goal of the study, researchers provided more than that in the first two months. 311 overweight and obese women each received a book that described their diet plan in detail; however for the first 8 weeks each participant was involved in weekly one-hour group sessions with a registered dietician and subsequently received follow up calls to ensure that they would keep their dr.’s appointments. Participants were paid a fee if they attended each follow up appointment. Certainly these extra factors alone may show that the study is skewed.
If the goal was to see if they would follow the diet simply by reading the book, nothing else should’ve been included as it then creates confounding variables. Would the outcome have been different for each diet plan followed had each participant not been involved in weekly sessions with a dietician? Would desire alone to lose weight have kept them following the plan and doctor appointments, or was the idea of receiving $75 for each appt. more enticing? Were Atkins dieters more motivated by these factors and the others less so? The other big question that is left unanswered is regarding the long term effects of being on a fatty diet, which makes me wonder if touting Atkins as the best diet plan is the responsible thing to do as I am sure many looking to lose weight will now go out stocking up on the bacon.
What do you think of this study and the idea of the Atkins diet overall?
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