Ok, maybe it's not a surprise, but today at least, it's sure going to be news (and perhaps I'll be the first to break the embargo at 12:01AM - thanks Blogger for allowing scheduled posts!).
It's going to be on radio, print and television - the results of the first prong of the DiOGenes study. DiOGenes is a multi-pronged study spearheaded over in Europe and today's spear has to do with trying to answer the question, "What's the best diet to help maintain weight loss?".
This study was an enormous undertaking as it looked at whole families, in 8 different European countries for between 6 and 12 months and randomized their dietary intakes to compare weight gain with diets high or normal in protein and high or low in glycaemic index carbohydrates.
In total, the study aimed
"to recruit a total of around 850 obese/overweight parents (BMI>28) from the 8 participating centres, corresponding to 450 families with an estimated 450-1050 children, where at least one child in each family is overweight."Mandatory too was an 8 week run-in weight loss phase where adult family members were required to lose 8% of their body weight before their family was admitted into the study.
The results weren't particularly surprising. Dietary protein helped maintain weight loss while GI index did not.
I think the most important part of the whole paper was a quote in the introduction that does a great job explaining why the world's getting so big so fast,
"Given our genetic background, it is essentially infeasible for humans to self-regulate food intake under current environmental circumstances."What this basically states is that in 2008, the default is weight gain, and I can't agree more. People haven't changed in the past 100 years, but our environment sure has and the reason we're gaining weight so quickly now is that since weight gain is the default, that means by definition maintenance of a healthy body weight in our current environment has actually become a skill. And just like other skills (martial arts for instance), just because your minds' eye might know what it looks like to do a jumping, spinning hook kick, it doesn't mean you can simply jump up and do one.
To extrapolate a martial arts analogy to healthy weight think of it this way: Just because your minds' eye might know what a healthy lifestyle looks like, to expect yourself, without instruction, to be able to simply jump up and happily live with one is often too much to ask (people do it unhappily all the time - that's called dieting).
Not surprisingly this study was funded by Big Food and here's one time where I think it's a great partnership. Here's an opportunity for Big Food to help by using their study to help pave the way to the creation of new food products that may be useful in preventing weight gain/regain.
Hurray for Big Food!
(there's something I don't say very often)
[BTW, I'll likely have a 5-10 second sound bite on CTV's National News tonight in Avis Favaro's story on this study should any of my Canadian readers want to watch]
4 comments:
"creating new food products"? What does that mean? What's wrong with people just going back to eating actual food? The North American obesity issue is precisely because we're so obsessed with creating new food products. THAT's the environment that's changed. Cultures where real food is consumed don't have obesity issues. WE didn't have obesity issues until the last 50 -60 years. We're all looking for quick convenient -- whether it's food or weight loss or anything else. We need to all relax, get our foods locally, cook our own foods, simply; sit down and have nice meals in peace and have small portions of a variety of foods. And we need to get off our butts and move around more. That's the only answer to our weight problems. Certainly not creating new "food products".
would you comment on how protein works to help maintain a healthy weight? a nutritionist has told me that protein is involved in some sort of chemical process in your body that helps with this? thank you.
Generally it works to help maintain a healthy weight by making people feel more satiated and therefore helping them to eat less.
As far as chemical processes go, it does take slightly more energy to metabolize than carbohydrates so theoretically you might burn slightly more calories. It also delays the speed with which the body is able to absorb coingested carbohydrates.
Could you get your appearance on to YouTube or Google or something? For the benefit of those of us who live in the nether parts of the continent?
Post a Comment