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Is There a Metabolic Advantage? You Be the judge.
I can ' t wait to get you started doing Atkins. But before I do, I want to increase your enthusiasm to a fever pitch. Are you ready to lose more weight and more fat-and keep it off, permanently-than you ' ve succeeded in doing on any other weight loss and weight maintenance plan you ' ve ever tried?
If so, let me introduce you to your ally, mentioned briefly in Chapter 2 and expanded upon here: the metabolic advantage.
You ' ll recall that I said the metabolic advantage would enable you to lose weight on Atkins eating more calories than on its low-fat counterpart. Burning fat takes more energy so you expend more calories when you follow a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach.
But let me tell you that this enormous dietary bonus is, today, years after it was first studied and a decade after the first edition of this book, still an area of some controversy. In this case it seems appropriate to let you be the judge. The published scientific evidence of the metabolic advantage is so impressive and my own decades of clinical observations so confirming of the conclusions those researchers reached that I ' m confident of the outcome. After you read this overview of the actual scientific evidence that underlies the metabolic advantage, you ' ll have the power of knowledge.
I know many of you are not of a scientific bent and are put off by doctors talking " medicalese " to you. But if you pay close attention to what follows, I promise you ' ll be privy to some of the most exciting scientific studies ever done on weight loss. And, before the chapter is over, I ' ll give you a small reward by demonstrating, through one of my patients, just how the metabolic advantage works in the case of a flesh-and-blood person.
I must acknowledge that I owe a debt to two brilliant British researchers, Professor Alan Kekwick and Dr. Gaston L. S. Pawan. In the 1950s and 1960s, the two were in the top echelon of British obesity research, both serving as chairmen of many international conferences. Professor Kekwick was Director of the Institute of Clinical Research and Experimental Medicine at London ' s prestigious Middlesex Hospital, and Dr. Pawan was the Senior Research Biochemist of that hospital ' s medical unit. Their seminal experiments( first on mice and then on obese humans) provided the breakthrough concept-including the mechanism, rationale and evidence-that a low-carbohydrate / high-fat diet has a metabolic advantage over so-called " balanced " or " conventional " low-fat diets.
In the early 1950s, the two researchers were struck by the many studies that suggested diets of different compositions of fat, protein and carbohydrate provided differing rates of weight loss. Their subsequent study on obese subjects found that those on a 1,000-calorie diet, comprised of ninety percent protein-and especially those on a diet comprised of ninety percent fat-lost weight( 0.6 pound and 0.9 pound per day, respectively). However, when the same subjects were given a diet with the same number of calories, but comprised of ninety percent carbohydrate, they did not lose any weight, but in fact gained a little.
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