Anyone see BBC's Horizons tonight-Atkins?

[ChrisH]

Horizons = some documentary style program on BBC.

They just did a report on the Atkins diet, and I thought you guys might like to know what they concluded.

I missed the middle of the program because I went out to get food, but I saw the end bit where they concluded it all.

They were concerned with:
1) If it works and how it works
2) Safety

Where to start...
A massive study done over here in the UK has just been completed, where they studied three traditional low fat, low carb diets and atkins. It wasn't neccessarily comparing atkins to normal style, but it showed some interesting results. The atkins group were losing the same amount as the others. Even though they are allowed to eat as much as they want as long as its low carbs, as opposed to the other three groups, who were just calorie and fat restricted. They found out that the atkins group was eating less calories than usual. even though they were allowed to eat as much as they liked, they were still eating less.
Then they tried to find the cause of this. One idea was that all the fat suppressed appetite. An experiment was performed, where a load of gorups of people were given as many servings as they wanted of some spaghetti style meal with some pudding. There were two types of meal, one had major amounts of fat added, the other didn't. They disguised it so it looked and tasted the same.
Heres the thing though, they actually found the OPPOSITE of what they suspected. A high fat meal doesn't suppress appetite compared to a low fat meal. The groups eating high fat meals requested more of the food than the low fat meal group.
Then they went onto a study performed in denmark or norway or something like that. (Some european country). The place doing the research (some university I think) opened a shop, where all the food was free, but the barcodes were scanned and contained the nutritional info of the product. So they were allowed to take as much as they needed. They selected 60 people, and split them into two groups. One group was mainly eating carbs, with low fat. The other was eating mostly lean protein sources. (So mainly protein and same amount of fat as the other group). The study was done over the course of one year.
I won't go into loads of details, but they basically found that the high-protein group lost more weight. They were eating less calories, even though they could eat as much as they wanted really. The protein actually suppressed appetite.

Earlier in the program, they also had some experiment/study showing that ketosis didn't have any effect on fat loss. I wish i'd seen that part, I just caught the last part of that section where the commentator person said "So, if the ketosis from the low carb isn't causing weight loss, what is?" It was something like that but probably sounded better.
The basic conclusion was that its not:
- The low carbs
- The ketosis
- The fat suppressing the appetite
they also had a few other theories about why it worked, which had been proven wrong.
The reason it works is because of the high protein diet. It suppresses appetite and makes people eat less calories than normal.

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I reckon the middle part of the program had all the safety research, so if anyone who watched the full program can fill us in that'd be cool. Basically, for number 2, they concluded that (as with most things), its a new thing so we don't know the long term effects of high-protein, high fat, low carb diets. Im guessing they will have gone on about the high fat thing being bad, which is pretty obvious isn't it?

[ChrisH]

For the TL;DR people:
Reason atkins works is because of high protein, not ketosis or low carbs or any of that.

[ChrisH]

Bump, if any of the mods can add "- Atkins" to the title that'd be cool. Noone knows wtf horizons is so they don't know its related.

[Franco]

I saw some bits and pieces of it. They definately had some valid poitns to make regarding certain elements of the diet and the research that surrounds it, on other areas the programme seemed far too ambiguous.

[Trent_Steel]

I tried to watch it, but I got very bored very quickly. They gave you one science fact and then spent 10 minutes showing film of unrelated stuff such as a scientist riding on her horse. Then after 10 minutes they gave you another fact. It was tedious. Im sick to death of TV programs assuming we are stupid and incapable of absorbing information quicker than a chimps. I thought the science part was ok, but if they had cut out all the crap they had filled it with, it would have been an informative 10 minute broadcast.

Thats my rant for the day.