Shock horror! Who'd have guessed?
theconversation.com/why-one...
This is an author's summary of the first results of a study involving 1002 participants. The article is very interesting, and links to an abstract of the actual study in Nature magazine.
I'd be interested in knowing people's thoughts about the study.
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I wish someone would share it with the NHS. They think there is only one diet for everyone
I wish the people on this list would read it and get the message that it's inappropriate to preach the gospel of LCHF.
Fascinating that people can read something saying that every diet will have different effects on different people at different times, some good effects, some bad and then immediately try to use it to rubbish one particular diet.
People round here are fond of claiming that they are following the science but they mean following the science but only if it agrees with their preconceptions.
I suspect most of us who eat low carb now did it by trusting science and fighting our preconceptions. I was literally weighing my food, keeping my fat low and making sure my saturated fat was below the NHS recommended limit. Indeed, just before I started LCHF, I had written a negative review* of HelloFresh (I got a free trial) because it was impossible to eat their food and keep within the NHS's fat and saturated fat guidelines. It took me a long time get my head around eating no beige carbs and upping the fat and eating butter again.
Over on the LCHF forum, I see this struggle repeated over and over by new members.
But yes, now I would resist studies that prove my diet is unhealthy or does not work, because it would take a lot of evidence to counter what I see when I walk past the mirror on the way to the shower.
*ironically, I now can't eat HelloFresh because there are too many carbs 😁
Sorry, but I believe it's not more important that the doctors who are giving us dietary advice understood that a low fat diet is harmful to many of us, and possibly most of us. They do not know this. If you are obese, eat low fat and are active, they think you are lying 🤥
But you're more concerned about a few people on social media shouting to make their voices heard above the deafening bullhorn of the orthodoxy, to let people know, as that article reports, there is another way.
Strange choice, but it's yours to make.
Have you actually taken the time to read the report?
“It’s time to move away from overly generalised guidelines, fad diets and one-size-fits-all plans and develop more personalised, scientific approaches to nutrition that understand and work together with our bodies, not against them.“
Subtle_badger Please try to keep calm and polite, we are all wanting the same things, support and friendly guidance, not more arguments
Yeah, I read the article.
The NHS are pushing a one-size-fits-all diet. Isn't that the thing we should be pushing back against, note over zealous posters?
Not just the NHS, but NICE, the USDA, the NIH, the Australian department of health, the NZ ministry of health, most diabetic organisations etc etc. Yeah, TheAwfulToad is a little evangelistic but is that the biggest problem here?
But not this article, which this post refers to. I’m sorry, I do not understand what you are disagreeing with 🤷♀️
The OP (who is gone: what happened yesterday?) seems to think this report should silence LCHF, but the NHS pushes a "one size fits all" diet. It seems more important that the NHS should take a lesson from this article than that I should.
I wonder why she has left? Another friendly member who we have lost due to arguments and disagreement
Very sad ☹️
There are probably many people here that agree with you, but this is not the place to be 'pushing back'. I very much doubt that anybody from the NHS ever looks at this forum, unless they are taking part on a weight loss journey, so your message won't reach them from here.
Right here, right now, this is a forum where people come to find friendly support on their weight loss journey's, what ever plan they choose to follow, they may from time to time like to take part in friendly debates about weight loss plans, but the majority do not enjoy the acrimonious atmosphere it is creating here.
Oh dear, how did I get to be the villain here? The OP literally was quoting the article to silence LCHFers.
I wish the people on this list would read it and get the message that it's inappropriate to preach the gospel of LCHF.
Interesting Article.
Subtle_badger I cannot find any reference to the NHS, NICE, USDA, NIH, the Australian Department of Health, NZ Ministry of Health or diabetic organisations in this article, which you mention in your reply. So I am confused as to the relevance of your response to the content of the article.
Across the Anglophone world, we are all advised to eat the same low fat, high carb diet. It's what most people understand when they say "healthy diet". But until the 1970s,this would have been a fad diet. It can be hard to realise that, if you have been eating that way (or striving to) all your life. Since we started following it, the anglophone world has got fatter and sicker.
The fact that no one diet suits everyone should spell the end of the Eatwell guide and the USDA MyPlate etc etc, not as used as a weapon to silence LCHFers.
Do you know I've been wondering about all this as I lost inches and weight off my body when I had to go on a very low fat diet? I have lost over a stone on LCHF plan but the inches are barely coming off. I have been pondering on this recently and seriously wondering about reverting to very low fat to shift the inches as well as the weight!! This article is certainly giving food for thought . Excuse the pun.
Welcome back Missionwoman . I'm glad you found this post interesting.
I believe some things on the forum have changed since you last visited us. Mayy i suggest you have a look around using the web page as opposed to the app.
If you can't find anything or need some help, please don't hesitate to ask. There's always someone here.
I hope to "see" you around.😉
Yes, actually, I found the same. To lose visceral fat I resorted to either VLCD or fasting.
People say you can't target a particular part of your body fat, but I think that is actually only true for subcutaneous fat. Visceral fat is metabolically different, and it doesn't seem surprising that it can respond to different diet or eating patterns.
Hi derrygeel,
This is an interesting post, and has sparked a healthy debate 
This is an article that I read, not too long ago:
bbc.co.uk/food/articles/ket...
I just wanted to add this link, about Keto and LCHF, in which it says that, after one year of eating low carb, the effect regarding weightloss, becomes similar to that of other diets.
I agree that we need to eat a plan, eating style, that works for us, as individuals, as there is no one size fits all.
Thanks to being a part of this forum, I have been able to try different methods, and, find my own 'plan' that works for me, to lose weight....I just need to remind myself to, 'Just Do It!' What can I say, baby steps lol
Have a wonderful Wednesday everyone
A polite warning - if this thread turns into another acrimonious dispute over which is the best and worse diet to follow, TA will close it!
Are you saying play nicely kids? 🤣
It would be very refreshing if people could
LMAO !!! x
Snap, 😆
Oooh I forgot to check how you got on today, off to have a look x
I've come to realise there's no "one size fits all" when it comes to dieting. I only really know what works for me 😀
My thoughts exactly. We are all different, we all have different likes & dislikes. Different ‘diets’ suit different people! Let’s celebrate the fact we are in an age where we can make our own informed decisions.
Love calorie counting? Brill, you go for it 👍
Following the NHS 12 week plan? Excellent 👍
LCHF your thing? Fab, you can do this 👍
Follow a plan such as Weight Watchers or Slimming World? Nice one 👍
Prefer a shake plan, Slim Fast, Juice Plus, Herbalife? You got this 👍
Anything else that floats your boat? If you’re happy, I’m happy 👍
The key is finding what works for you & more importantly what you are happy doing. Enjoying a plan whatever it may be to improve your overall health is maybe more important that those figures displayed on the sad step every week.
Keep smiling & keep well everyone.
Hear hear! 😊
Hooray! Brilliant response! I'm fed up with people carping, now can we please all get back to our own preferred weight loss plans, and cheer everybody else along on theirs! Vive la différence!
Yayyy ! 3 Cheers for the Teacher ! HIP HIP ?
C`mon, don't leave me hanging !
HOORAY! (Stand-in for Tt 
)
Ha ha ! Cheers Chick, knew someone would come to my rescue ! x
Hip hip Hooray! lol
YAYY ! Love it x
“Enjoying a plan whatever it may be to improve your overall health is maybe more important that those figures displayed on the sad step every week.
Keep smiling & keep well everyone.”
😊👏👍
😁😁😁 Love this
Oooh my friend (and her twin) took part in this 😊 I must share the link with her
Thanks Derrygeel, I have definitely lost weight on my plan and am no longer pre-diabetic and am glad I managed it. I would definitely say I tailored it to me as my obsession was not to become diabetic and I cut sugar, swapped my white carbs for healthier ones and am where I want to be in a matter of months. I think I could have maybe got to where I am with calorie counting instead but not 5:2 - my brain couldn't do that nor LCHF as a dairy free vegetarian who isn't that hot on nuts , it wouldn't work long term for me.
Seems fair.
Calorie counting clearly works for some but not everyone.
Low carb is a powerful method but it may be too restrictive for some dieters.
Some steer clear of fats, others embrace healthy fats.
There are endless combinations and variations with intermittent fasting and exercising thrown into the mix.
The main thing is that individuals find a method that works for them, and more importantly a lifestyle that keeps on working for them.
"and more importantly a lifestyle that keeps on working for them."
Now we're really getting there. It's not about "being on a diet"short-term. It's finding a way to eat that works for you and that you can keep up for the rest of your life.
Exactly so.
For me, I struggled to calorie count as my core diet. However, a successful calorie counter would not only want to lose weight by this method but to maintain their goal by perhaps a higher calorie goal, and then keeping tabs on it potentially forever.
LCHF has done the job for me, because I rather like the meat/fish + 3 veg formula and don't miss too many sugary or carby foods, so I'm comfortable with continuing with the method, perhaps with a slightly higher protein and carb intake (I'm tinkering to find the balance level) indefinitely.
I suppose it's possible to do one thing to reach a goal and something else to stay there.
But what's undeniable is that most diets appear to fail, with dieters falling back to old habits and old weights. Finding the key to sustainable maintenance is arguably even more important than losing the weight in the first place.
If one-size-fits-all diets are miserable experiences for the dieter, only tolerated to attain a goal weight, then perhaps it's unsurprising that failure is common.
So success in maintenance is likely to be very individual and needs to be an eating methodology that the individual enjoys. A truly lifestyle centred choice.
😄
Maybe the one size fits all diet is the one our heart is in and we can therefore stick to. We win the healthy weight lottery when we discover the perfect diet for both our body and our heads.
PS just passing by. Deciding if forums are for me.
Thank you Phew2020, and I agree about the best way being the one that works for you 😊
Let me know if you think this forum is right for you 😊
Thank you.
How old is this study?
If you click on the link it tells you, (June 2020)
The trick is to find the method that works for you.
Regrettably I expect people could fruitlessly try multiple different diets that don't work for them, or even worse, repeatedly try the same unsuccessful diet (for them) in the face of assurances that it should work if only they did it right.
How long do we need to give a diet to see if it works for us, do you think?
A personal view, but I think the body needs a couple of weeks to adjust to any significant change and then it takes a couple more weeks to see if it's working.
If a diet isn't working after 4 weeks, then the diet needs tinkering with (portion size or food options) or abandoning entirely for a different methodology.
So around a month. Long enough to give a diet a proper shot.
Not so long lost if it turns out to be a bust.
In my experience, it was like a switch had gone on in my brain, offering hope, straight away. Within a couple of days I felt healthier and had more energy. The weight loss was slow but I wasn’t in a hurry. (About a pound a week) After about 2/3 weeks I felt I could do this. That was 5 years ago and I’ve maintained an acceptable weight ever since. 😊
I feel a whole new post coming. What would be the first thing in your basket if you had been away from your home country. 🙂
It makes sense and is something I’ve discovered anecdotally. If we can agree some bodies respond differently to different foods in cases like allergies, lactose intolerance, etc. we should also be able to agree different bodies respond differently to different foods in nutrition and weight loss.
About 20 years ago one of my morbidly obese friends lost all her excess weight and kept it off after finding a special “blood type” diet that suggested different foods and ways of eating based on your blood type. The idea was that your blood type was part of your genetic evolution and helped identify what kinds of foods were best suited for your genetic profile. For some types, dairy was fine, for others it was suggested to severely limit dairy. For some, red meats were promoted, for others, grains and pulses were the foundation of the diet. For her, she finally found the combination of foods that kept her slim and healthy (perhaps surprisingly for some on this site, her profile was based on grains and pulses and that’s what worked for her. Mine was red meat and no dairy.) That diet didn’t have all the answers for the complexity of our genetics, but it opened my eyes to the concept that we know so very little about the effects of foods on different bodies, and the diet that works for your friend may be completely wrong for you and your genetics. And I know the study you’ve linked here actually suggests genetics may not even be the answer but it’s physiological and environmental factors like stress, age, gender, medical conditions, etc which create a very complex human body that may respond to foods in complex and different ways.
It’s exactly what we see here on this forum... different approaches work differently for different people. Since there is still a lot scientists don’t know about the impact of different foods on different genetic profiles and situations, this forum is an amazing place to see different strategies, and to get new ideas if our current approach isn’t working for us!
And finally, I understand the current debate on this forum. I think a lot of LCHF people are so frustrated with years of being advised to follow a high carb, low fat regime and then found exactly the opposite worked for them in both weight loss and every other measure of good health, they can’t help but shout about it to everyone who is trying to lose weight. At the same time, I understand that others who are trying to follow a different regime that works very well for them are equally frustrated now by a few very dogmatic LCHFers on this site who insist that LCHF is the one correct path for everyone and do not respect that a different approach can physiologically work better for many.
So I think tolerance all around is the message of the day, Share ideas and strategies that are working for you. Share research that shows what works for large cohorts of people. But please resist insisting there is a single way that works for everyone and be open to allowing everyone to go on their own journey that suits their genetic, psychological, and environmental profile. Hugs, everyone!
Presumably none of the blood types responded best to a diet of Victoria sponge🙁
Oh if only! Heck, it’s worth a try!😆
haha, that would be nice
Have you decided yet wether you would like to join us as a member?
I don’t know really. I don’t have any weight to lose (anymore, I’ve already lost it) so maybe I’m a fraud. I might be more welcome on the low carb site...? Sorry. Tell me to go if I don’t fit.
It's hard to ascertain details from the outline summary, but from what's there:
1) The study has no hypothesis. That in itself doesn't mean it's bad science, but it does impose severe limitations on the interpretation of results.
2) The experiment starts with a whole bunch of axiomatic assumptions that aren't supported by known biochemistry.
3) The dietary prescription is vague. It appears to be both free-choice and macronutrient-controlled, so I'm not sure how that works.
4) "Results do not support conclusions"
I'll pick these apart to avoid accusations that I'm making another pitch for LCHF (I'm not).
1) Because the experiment is not designed to refute some hypothesis, the results are useful only to inform the design of subsequent experiments. It is logically impossible to draw any scientifically-robust conclusion from the outcome(s) of a study like this. In particular, the meaning of any statistical tests would be defined by the formulation of the (non-existent) hypothesis.
2) Example: the experimenters acknowledge the role of the gut biome, but do not (apparently) appreciate how that ecosystem establishes and changes in response to the diet itself; and (b) they fail to recognise that a human body implements multiple adaptive control systems that (again) self-tune according to the content of the diet, and that may fail completely if persistently pushed beyond their adaptive limits. In other words, there is a profound interaction between what people want to eat, what they actually eat, and the way their bodies respond to what they eat. Our bodies are not simple, fixed-function machines which respond in a certain way to certain inputs for all time.
Amusingly enough, they acknowledge that genetics plays only a small part in metabolic response (which implies, incidentally, that we are all built far more alike than we are different) but they completely fail to draw the proper conclusion (ie., the paragraph above).
2) As far as I can make out, the subjects are instructed to eat one particular diet. If they are already metabolically ill (and it's a well-established fact that around a third of the Western population are in that state), then by definition the results observed in those patients will be abnormal. Although those abnormal results might be useful in a proper experimental context, they don't tell you anything useful about healthy subjects eating healthy food.
3) We're not told what people are actually eating; for all we know they're eating Froot Loops and Kool-Aid for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch, and Pizza Hut for tea. Those would be compatible with the stated macro profile (about 50/50 energy calories from fat vs. carbs). To be fair, you can't put this sort of detail in a summary, but it would be nice to see a thumbnail sketch of typical meals.
4) The experimenters are excited by their observation of postprandial lipemia and its association with metabolic disease. But this is hardly novel. It's been known for at least 10 years that people with Metabolic Syndrome have elevated levels of circulating triglycerides, most of the time. Indeed this is an established sign of Metabolic Syndrome.
Although they don't state it outright, they appear to be suggesting that, while "there is no one size fits all diet", we should all be eating low-fat diets:
" ... a rise in these inflammation markers was linked to having unhealthy responses to fat.
We use the term “dietary inflammation” to refer to these unhealthy metabolic effects that are triggered after eating. Repeatedly experiencing dietary inflammation brought on by excessive blood sugar and fat responses is linked with an increased risk of conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and obesity."
It's worth pointing out, though, that the mechanism that causes persistently-elevated triglycerides is well-understood. The clue is in the fact that these excessive TGs are built mostly from palmitic acid, regardless of the fatty-acid profile of meals. Palmitic is the usual endpoint of de novo lipogenesis - the process by which human bodies re-route excess glucose-based metabolic power. In other words, people who respond badly to dietary fat are in a crisis-management state with regard to dietary carbohydrates. Refer back to point (2).
Finally, the conclusion "one-size-fits-all diets don’t work" simply doesn't follow from the observation that different people respond in different ways to the same type of meal. It only shows that the particular diet used in the experiment doesn't work. In no sense does the experiment demonstrate that there might not be a diet that does work for pretty much everyone. I don't believe that there is any such ideal diet, nor do I believe there is any merit in the idea that we all need tailored diets. Humans are incredibly adaptable omnivores and seem to thrive on a wide range of things. I'm just pointing out the flaw in the logic.
I am of course using the word "diet" here to mean "a way of eating", not in the sense of "weight-loss diet".
Just my personal observation on the subject of human-compatible diets: if you told a farmer there is no "one size fits all" diet for his pigs or his chickens, he'd laugh in your face. It is completely obvious to him that, if he gives them inappropriate food for their species, he will at best lose money; at worst, he'll have a bunch of sick or dead animals on his hands. He knows that certain macro profiles will affect all pigs in pretty much the same way. He knows that you can't give grains to a ruminant [yes, I know feedlots do this; they get away with it because the animal is slaughtered before it dies of metabolic disease]. He knows that chickens need a fairly specific mix of carbs and fat for specific reasons (eg., excess fat impairs calcium absorption).
Of course humans aren't bred for profit (cynics: insert wisecrack here). Humans therefore have a fairly wide range of diets that they'll get along with, but there are limits, and some diets are surely worse than others. Some diets are really bad for us, and I'd argue that any diet that depends on the existence of industrial farming, government subsidies, and fossil fuels is probably not something we're adapted to deal with.
This is no surprise. When you look into weight loss one of the first things you find is that we all have different basal metabolic rates. I'm quite lucky at the moment - I'm big enough to lose weight without a super-strict diet. Someone smaller than me ( e.g an older, shorter, female ) would struggle to lose weight on what I eat. Having said that - we all have to control what we eat in some way whether it's calories, carbs, fat or just portion size.
Do what suits you best.
How interesting about the GI of sponge - presumably the butter and eggs lower it. I don’t eat any sugar myself, it does not agree with me. In fact, my diet is mostly keto, but I hope that won’t prompt a negative reaction here...
>> So the individual differences are not necessarily down to genetics as implied, but more a person's current state of health/disrepair?
Exactly.
The underlying assumption behind all nutrition studies is that human bodies are inherently messed up, and have to have food intake consciously controlled or we'll implode. This is just daft. For once, I'd like to see a nutrition study that starts from a more reasonable assumption, viz., that a human body is astoundingly well-crafted machine that incorporates an ingenious set of failsafes, backups, and plan-Bs to cope with anything that nature might throw at it. Unfortunately, it seems the designer of said ingenious machine never accounted for the possibility of dieticians.
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Anyone on Keto Diet?
Finding my 'ideal' weight
Vegetable and Fruit Diet Suggestions 
Need help, not diet related
Gaining weight yet dieting
