In the battle of the trend diets, new research puts low-fat diets below low-carb and Mediterranean options.
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But some diet experts went so far as to say that the study provides further evidence that one of the biggest misconceptions about dieting is that dietary fat is anathema if you want to achieve the best results.
"The common misconception that low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets raise blood cholesterol is shown, again, not to be true," said Dr. Eric Westman, director of the Lifestyle Medicine Clinic at the Duke University Medical Center. "In fact, the diet with the highest amount of fat [the Mediterranean diet] lowered the total cholesterol/HDL ratio the most!"
Moreover, Dr. Paul Shekelle, director of the Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Center at the RAND Corporation, said that in his own experience he has found that the Mediterranean diet is the one that dieters are more likely to stick with for an extended period of time.
"The Mediterranean diet is the one I find patients are most likely to maintain long-term compliance with," Shekelle said, adding that the low-carb, high-protein diet commonly known as the "Atkins" diet is the one that dieters have the hardest time sticking to.
"If any primary care physician … has a patient on the Atkins diet two years on, you should probably find that patient and … find out how they did it," Shekelle explained. "I've not seen anyone in my practice who is still on the diet two years later. Compliance past a few months is the number one problem with the Atkins diet."
But some experts said that because of the specific diet plans used in the study, the results are far from conclusive in determining the "best diet."
"The study has important technical flaws," said Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Specifically, Barnard pointed to the study's use of a "low-fat" diet plan, "which is not low in fat at all."
Rather than a traditional low-fat diet plan — such as the Ornish Diet, which designates that only 10 percent of calories should be derived from fat — researchers assigned subjects in the low-fat diet group to a plan based on the American Heart Association guidelines, which derives 30 percent of its calories from fat.
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