It's All About the Calories

Certainly some diets are healthier than others. But, when it comes to weight loss it's all about the number of calories consumed. In today's New England Journal of Medicine researchers from Harvard and the Louisiana State University showed that the percentage of carbohydrate or fat in the diet did not have any measurable effect on the amount of weight lost over 6 months (about 13 lbs on average) when caloric consumption was similar. This is not surprising to those of us who work in the field of nutrition and metabolism. It has long been suspected that people can lose weight using any system that they can latch onto, as long as it helps motivate and/or discipline them to eat less.