Healthy Food Chart

We've been talking a lot on the blog lately about quality vs. quantity of calories.  On one end of the spectrum are those who insist that weight loss (or gain) is simply a matter of quantity: It doesn't matter whether you eat protein, fat, complex carbs, or sugar; if you simply eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. 

On the other end are those who believe that quality is the key: you can eat as many calories as you want without gaining weight as long as they are the right kind of calories (i.e. protein and fat rather than refined carbohydrates).  

Those in the second camp spend a lot of time talking about how refined carbohydrates stimulate insulin release which promotes fat storage, while protein increases thermogenesis and fat-burning.  But I think the magnitude of these metabolic effects is greatly over-stated. 

I suspect that the real "magic" of the low-refined-carb diet is that it tends to regulate calorie intake.

Refined carbohydrates tend to stimulate appetite and lead to over-consumption. But what if you take appetite out of the equation.  What happens when someone else decides what and how much you eat? Consider this recent study: 

After losing an average of 36 pounds on a weight loss program, obese subjects were put on one of two weight maintenance regimens: one was high protein and the other high in carbs.  A year later, both groups were equally successful in maintaining their weight loss. The researchers concluded that "the protein or carbohydrate content of the diet has no effect on successful weight-loss maintenance."  

When calories and macronutrients are "tightly controlled," the metabolic magic of the low-carb diet is undetectable.  This would seem to support my suspicion: The primary advantage of the low-refined-carb diet is not that it recalibrates the body's metabolism and tendency to store or burn fat, but that it reins in appetite, thereby reducing calorie intake. Nothing wrong with that!

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