Dietas y más dietas...

Las dietas son un tema recurrente en las personas. Me animo a decir que especialmente para las mujeres es un tema más cotidiano que para los hombres, pero no es exclusivo de las mujeres, claro.

Si alguien baja de peso, siempre preguntas cómo le hizo, con qué doctor fue, qué dieta siguió y demás... y empieza esa dieta o ese doctor o nutriólogo a ser popular por lo efectivo de la dieta supuestamente... lo malo es que hay muchas personas que no son doctores, no son nutriólogos y se avientan a recetarte cosas y a darte dietas... y uno las toma. Y es un negociaaaaazo.

Hace poco escuché un podcast que coordina un médico (profesor de Yale) y me resultó muy ilustrativo en este tema, así que les paso la transcripción (con mi edición) de la parte que habla de las dietas:
(está en inglés)

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"The bottom line is that the only real proven way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume.

The formula calories in, vs. calories out is it. That's the bottom line and there is no way around that formula.

A study from UCLA reports basically that dieting does not work, not that any particular diet, but dieting o itself. Initially you can lose 5 -10% of your weight on any diet, but almost everybody gains it back, the for the vast majority of people. You have to change your habits, diets do not lead to sustain weight loss of health benefits, not only go on a diet. There is a multi billion dollar industry that is trying to convince you that there is a way around this formula of calories in vs. calories out.

Its unhealthy to lose weight and gain it back, to do yo-yo diets. You lose water, muscle, fat and you gain primarily back only fat. You can weight the same but now you have more fat and less muscle. 50% of dieters weight more than 11 pound over their starting weight than 5 years after their diets.

Other study compared different diets. A comparison of a high carb vs. a low carb diet, a real life comparison of some of the popular diets, like the Atkins diet versus others. The results showed that the people who were on the Atkins diets lost more weight over the first year of the study, people on this study lost the weight early on, in the first 3 to 4 months and then they gained some of that weight back, and they were actually in the process of gaining that weight back at the end of the study. The weight loss was very modest, for example, 10 pounds over a year for people who are significantly overweight. This study was conducted at the USDA Department of Human Nutrition Research Centre on Aging at Tufts University. They compared a high carb diet and a low carb diet and, the new thing about this study, is that it is a large, well controlled study that gave their subject all their food that they were supposed to eat. They wanted to know, not only how this diets behave in real life, but is there any physiological difference to eating a high carbohydrate diet versus a low carbohydrate diet.

They wanted to control as much as possible what people are eating, they make the diets as equally as they could in terms of their appeal and fiber and volume, caloric intake, etc. The difference was that the high-carb was 60% and the low was 40%. The used biochemical markers to assess if the subjects were sticking to the diet or they were cheating, so they did not rely upon self reporting. They were able to show that both groups did cheat one 16% and 17% the other, so it was very comparable.

This is so far, the best controlled study in terms of what the people are actually getting and what they found is that there was 0 difference between the 60% carb diet and the 40% carb diet, so this is significant evidence against the notion that adjusting the proportion of macro nutrients, specifically in this case carbohydrates, makes any difference to weight loss. Weight loss is about calories, not where the calories are coming from".