Losing weight by taking a low-fat diet has additional advantages. It can do wonders to your mood and improve your psychological state.
Losing weight by taking a low-fat diet has additional advantages. It can do wonders to your mood and improve your psychological state. It actually works better than a low-carbohydrate plan with the same number of calories, says a report in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, a Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) publication.
Despite the consistency of official recommendations advocating a high-carbohydrate, low-fat, energy-restricted diet for treating obesity, the epidemic has led to widespread interest in alternative dietary patterns for weight management, including very low-carbohydrate ‘ketogenic’ diets that are typically high in protein and fat (particularly saturated fat), the authors wrote.
“These are very interesting findings, since according to our experience, weight loss due to any treatment leads to mood elevation. However, we also need to take blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure into account, since low levels of these variables, which may occur more after specific diets, may also affect mood and cognition,” said Dr Anoop Misra, head of the diabetes and metabolic diseases, Fortis Hospitals, Delhi.
Dr Grant D Brinkworth of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation, Adelaide, and his colleagues conducted a randomised clinical trial involving 106 overweight and obese participants of average age 50. Of these, 55 were randomly assigned a very low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet and 51 to a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet for a year.
A year later, the overall average weight loss was 13.7 kg. Both groups initially experienced an improvement in mood. However, most measurements of mood revealed a lasting improvement in only those following the low-fat diet.
Those on the high-fat diet returned to their initial levels — i.e. their mood returned to their negative baseline levels.“This outcome suggests that some aspects of the low-carbohydrate diet may have had detrimental effects on mood that, over the year, negated any positive effects of weight loss,” the authors wrote.
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