This is going to blow you out of the water if you think that low-carb is good. If you think that the key to losing weight is a low-carb, high-fat diet.
This is a very well-designed study where they used matched pairs of lean men.
And here’s what they did.
They called them Siamese Twins, which may somehow be politically incorrect, but you get the idea.
Other studies may have used men that had a different activity level, so this study used PAIRS of men matching each other’s activity level.
Smart, right?
They actually had each pair do the same things, the same activities, the same kind of exercise, for a number of weeks during the study period.
That way, the men matched each other’s activity levels.
But there was one difference in each pair.
One of the pair eight far too many carbs. Gorged on carbs.
The other of the pair gorged on fat, ate way too much fat.
So you have these matched pairs of men, one of each pair gorge is on fat, the other gorgeous on carbohydrates.
In the carbohydrates, eaters gorged mostly on sugar. Candy bars, sweets, soda, mostly simple sugars.
And they actually evaluated these pairs over time.
And what they found will shock you to the core, but are you open-minded enough to actually acknowledge what is going on here?
It’s been hard for me because it’s studies like this that I’ve really changed my thinking about carbohydrates versus fat.
First of all, each of these pairs gained weight.
They gained different amounts of weight.
They gained an average of about a pound and a half over three weeks.
Keep in mind, this weight gain of approximately 1 1/2 pounds came from three weeks of tremendous overeating.
There was no difference in fat loss or fat gain between the high carb and the high-fat eaters
But there was a huge difference in body composition.
The high carb men gained a lean muscle mass
They gained good, useful muscle.
The high-fat group did not gain muscle. They gained weight, but all the weight was fat.
And there was another big difference between the two groups.
The high carb people lost a good amount of carbs in their feces. 30% of the excess calories went into the toilet
The high-fat men did not lose that through their feces. They gain the fat around their body.
But what about insulin?
Insulin levels were the same in both groups.
Neither one of them is going to become diabetic.
If anything, insulin was worse with the high-fat people, but in general, insulin was pretty normal for both groups.
The myth of sugar turning to fat in the body
This shows one of the primary myths of eating a lot of sugar. Which is that sugar makes you fat. But to do so, sugar would have to be TURNED into fat in the body.
In this study, with massive over eating, there were only about one and a half pounds of weight gained.
Only a small amount of the carbohydrates turned into fat. This is known as de novo lipogenesis, and it is a VERY inefficient process. The body doesn’t turn many carbs into fat, whether the carbs are “simple” sugars or “complex” like brown rice.
Sugar doesn’t make you fat
No, sugar does not make you fat. In fact, sugar makes you lean!
I’ll have more studies about the benefits of sugar shortly.
But the takeaways here are that;
One, you might want to rethink diets that are very high in fats.
Two, you may want to, at least, open your mind to the fact that sugar may not be the devil after all.
And that there may be some benefits to sugar.
Citations
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bjorn_Quistorff/publication/12294352_Effects_of_isoenergetic_overfeeding_of_either_carbohydrate_or_fat_in_young_men/links/0fcfd505730ae9a463000000.pdf
Click for more information on High Carbohydrates or fats in diet, for Diet & Exercise information, or for information about Fish Oil.