He wrote numerous publications on low-carbohydrate diets and also cited on numerous occasions studies conducted by the Cochrane initiative, possibly the most important when it comes to systematic reviews on health. So it was imperative that I publish an entry dedicated to the new Cochrane review on the effectiveness of low-carbohydrate diets for weight loss and health indicators, compared to high-carbohydrate diets (45-65% of energy from carbohydrates and are called «carbohydrate balanced»)
The work was published a couple of days ago with the title «Low Carb Diets or Balanced Carb Diets: Which Works Better for Weight Loss and Heart Disease Risks?» (2022) and as Cochrane collaborators have the good habit of doing summaries in «normal» languageI am going to limit myself to translating some of its most significant fragments.
There they go:
«The aim was to investigate whether low-carbohydrate diets were better than balanced-carbohydrate diets for weight loss and heart disease risk factors in overweight or obese adults (…) also in people with and without diabetes type 2.
We found 61 trials with 6925 overweight or obese people. The largest trial was in 419 people and the smallest in 20 people. All but one of the trials were conducted in developed countries around the world and almost half were conducted in the US. Most trials (36) were conducted in people who did not have heart disease or risk factors. Most people (5,118 people) did not have type 2 diabetes. The average starting weight of people in the trials was 95 kg. Most studies (37) lasted six months or less; and the longest studies (6) lasted two years.
Low-carbohydrate diets probably result in little or no difference in weight loss in the short term (trials lasting 3 to 8.5 months) and long term (trials lasting one to two years) compared to diets balanced carbohydrates, in people with and without type 2 diabetes. In the short term, the average difference in weight loss was about 1 kg and, in the long term, the average difference was less than 1 kg.
People lost weight on both diets in some trials. The amount of weight lost on average varied greatly between both diets in different trials, from less than 1 kg in some trials to around 12 kg in others in the short and long term.
Similarly, low-carbohydrate diets for up to two years are likely to result in little or no difference in diastolic blood pressure, glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), and LDL cholesterol («unhealthy» cholesterol).
We were unable to draw conclusions about unwanted effects because very few trials included them.
(…)
There is likely little or no difference in weight reduction and changes in cardiovascular risk factors up to two years of follow-up, when overweight and obese participants, with and without type 2 diabetes, are randomly assigned to low-fat diets. carbohydrates or balanced in carbohydrates.»
In summary, we can interpret these results in two ways, depending on our expectations and previous ideas: A positive one, seeing that low-carbohydrate diets work at least as well as high-carbohydrate ones. And another negative, considering that low-carb diets are not significantly better than high-carb ones.
If any of the readers want to delve deeper into the investigation, in this link You can find the complete review and learn the details and nuances that you consider appropriate.
