I take my cue from an article that appeared on the website of blogger Denise Minger (known as the girl who successfully challenged Dr. Colin Campbell’s China Study), whose reading was suggested to me by a nutritionist, on the two effective ways to lose weight in a hurry, that is to enter, forcing the door a little, into the magical sectors of weight loss , those success stories of which we often read and of which we are amazed, and which never make us understand what is better, if a fat-free diet or a carbohydrate-free diet.
In an interesting post, which has been around the blogs and aroused the comments of some doctors giving way to an interesting debate, Denise Minger makes a very long examination of the history of low fat and low carb dietswhich really deserves to be read in its entirety (you have to lose at least a couple of hours, eh. Here the full text , in English, currently only available in the first part, where Minger defends low-fat or low-fat diets) , and where in a nutshell it says this: do you want to lose weight quickly? Then choose a low-fat (less than ten percent of total calorie requirement), high-carbohydrate (with normal protein content) diet, or choose a high-fat (greater than 65 percent) diet, normal protein and low carbohydrate content. Both solutions work for fast weight loss. Because?

Because in the case of the low-fat and high-carbohydrate diet, the body optimizes the carbohydrate metabolism, causing rapid weight loss : this is the case of vegan diets, high starch diets, fruitarian diets, the Graham diet, but also of the Ornish and TLC diet (diets where the consumption of meat is limited to white meat only, where fish is consumed and where eggs are only seen once a week), the Okinawa diet and the pescovegana diet.

In the case of the high-fat diet, the metabolic state of ketosis, in which the body disposes of fats instead of sugars, promotes fast weight loss : this is the case of various types of ketogenic diets, from Atkins to Banting to Bulletproof and to others, up to the Paleodieta.

In both cases, in fact, you can notice the same effects of rapid weight loss and, even if it seems difficult to believe, the same effects on health as a consequence of this weight loss: you can find the case of the vegan who lost fifty kilos by eating. large quantities of whole grains and legumes, and the case of low carb which loses just as much weight. And in both cases, by losing so much weight, cholesterol is lowered, health conditions improve. This is until the diet is unsustainable.
In the case of low fat, such a low fat content can lead to stress and cardiovascular disease (yes, just like a western high-fat diet), in the case of low carb, the metabolism slows down, and diseases affecting the thyroid.

Protein diets like Dukan, balanced ones like the Mediterranean or the Zone, don’t really belong to either of the two strands. Not even Paleo, which despite not having a fixed percentage of macronutrients, is around 50% of fat.

Minger is against the idea of ​​considering the Mediterranean diet as a low-fat and says that anything that does not fall into this division produces results, yes, but in the long term. Despite being a former vegan, she does not promote low fat or low carb in particular: what she says is that both solutions are sure to lose weight quickly. She doesn’t even claim that they are healthy, although there are some beneficial health effects on fast weight loss as I said earlier. She just states that they work.