Will Your Diet Make You Fat?

The diet wars are heating up again. This is the time of year that many people want to shed the excess pounds they put on between Thanksgiving and New Years. But should the diet be low or high in protein? A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that relying on your bathroom scale won’t tell the whole story.
Researchers fed 25 healthy young adults a high-calorie diet. These volunteers were forced to eat approximately 1,000 extra calories a day for eight weeks. Some received a very low-protein diet, representing only 5 percent of their total calorie intake. The others got either 15 percent or 25 percent of their calories from protein. Although those on the low-protein diet gained less weight, they did so by losing muscle mass. This is not desirable. An accompanying editorial says overeating low-protein diets may increase fat deposition and recommends that clinicians assess a patient’s fatness rather than relying on body weight.
[JAMA, Jan. 4, 2012]