Low-Calorie Diets vs. Low-Carb Diets

By Adrian Nadler
[Nutrition & Diet]
When you’re trying to lose weight, is it better to eat low-carb or low-cal?  Adrian Nadler looks at new research that may provide some answers.
Diets can be complicated, but weight loss, a euphemism for fat loss, is simple:  burn more calories than you take in and you’ll lose weight.  With only two options, exercise more or eat less, many people opt for a low calorie diet.  This involves cutting back on portions, avoiding high fat foods (because fat is richer in calories than protein or carbohydrates) and replacing junk food, processed food, fast food and the like, with low-calorie, nutrient-dense alternatives.

Another option is to adjust your diet to reduce only the amount of carbohydrates, which have a direct link with your body fat.  Carbohydrates break down into sugar, and when there is more sugar in your bloodstream than your body needs, the insulin your body produces not only halts its regular fat-burning process, but also creates more fat using the excess sugar.  Robert Atkins popularized this type of diet, which reduces all carb consumption to just 20g a day of greens and other vegetables, then gradually cycles small amounts of carbs back in.

Dieting Study De-Livers

A study exploring the effects of diet on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is associated with obesity and diabetes, was done in January of 2009.  Although small, with seven obese or overweight participants on each diet, researchers found that a low-carb diet is more effective for getting rid of excess fat in the liver.  In what seems like a contradiction, the livers of people on low calorie diets actually used more of their glycogen (stored carbohydrate) for energy, as opposed to the low-carb dieters whose livers burned off extra fat instead.

The study also has implications outside of liver disease prevention.  Researchers found that “patients on the low-carbohydrate diet increased fat burning throughout the entire body.”  And even more conclusively, low-calorie dieters lost an average of about 5 pounds during the two-week duration of the study, while the low-carb dieters averaged almost twice that, 9.5 pounds.

The Meaning Of Calorie Reduction

So why wasn’t the low-calorie diet as effective for losing weight?  There are many unknowns in this study, including the detailed breakdown of meal content and timing.  The best we can do is speculate and based on the link between high levels of sugar in the bloodstream and its conversion to body fat, it makes sense that a diet targeting that mechanism would be more effective than counting calories alone.

It’s also important to keep in mind that both diets resulted in weight loss.  If you control calories by limiting snacking to ‘cheat days’, by replacing fattier meats with lean ones, replacing sugary drinks with water, etc. and by separating large meal portions into smaller ones spread throughout the day, you will lose weight.  Calorie reduction is the first step not only towards weight loss, but  also towards good nutrition in general because it encourages the selection of whole foods over processed ones, more low-calorie high-nutrient vegetables and less unnecessary sugar, salt and fat.  Going ahead and focusing on carbohydrate reduction is better for weight loss, but shunning all carbs isn’t necessary or even good for you in all cases.
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