LOW CARB DIET RESEARCH

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A Harvard School of Public Health study may stand dieting wisdom on its head, after low-carbohydrate dieters lost more weight than low-fat dieters despite eating 25,000 extra calories over a 12-week study period. The findings generated national attention after Penelope Greene, a visiting scholar in the School of Public Health's Nutrition Department, presented her research last week (Oct. 13) at the annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The study, conducted with Walter Willett, Nutrition Department chair and Fredrick Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, put three groups of dieters on different regimens. They included a low-fat group, a low-carbohydrate group that ate the same number of calories, and a third group on a similar low-carbohydrate plan that included 300 extra calories a day. Participants in all three groups lost weight, Greene said, with the low-fat group losing an average of 17 pounds and the low-carbohydrate group that ate the same number of calories losing 23 pounds. The biggest surprise, however, was that the low-carbohydrate dieters eating extra calories lost more than those on the low-fat diet. Participants in that low carbohydrate group lost an average of 20 pounds.

The study was carefully controlled for what participants ate over the 12 weeks. Rather than giving participants a list of approved foods and quantities and setting them free, Greene had the food prepared fresh daily according to special recipes at a Cambridge restaurant, Ristorante Marino. First Greene herself, then the restaurant's chefs, Prepared meals from a meticulously crafted menu, and bagged them so participants could pick them up daily. Each bag, color-coded and picked up in the early evening, contained that night's dinner, a snack, the next day's breakfast and lunch, and a multivitamin/mineral supplement.

Greene said she and Juniper Devecis, a registered dietician, spent considerable time before the study began creating the menu, trying out different dishes and different preparations of the same dishes. Her aim was to make the meals tasty and as similar as possible even though people were eating very different diets. The result was that participants had similar meals throughout the study period, though portion sizes and preparation did vary. Greene selected aging baby-boomers as participants because of concern about increasing health threats from obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease as the boomers age.

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