| "It's hard to keep a bad diet down. Doctors at Stanford University Medical School published a year-long study last month in the Journal of the " " comparing four popular diets, from low-carb to low-fat. Once again, the Atkins diet won." "The news media loves good irony and thus provided pork rind lovers with more ammunition to combat all those " " at work. The study calls to mind the words of the late Robert Atkins, the originator of the Atkins diet, who wondered sarcastically at what point he could say, "I told you so." " ": Atkins (very low-carb), the Zone (low-carb), the LEARN diet (low-fat, national guidelines) and the Ornish diet (very low-fat). At six months, the 70-some women on the Atkins diet were way ahead of the other women in weight loss. This confirmed what many studies have shown before: People on Atkins lose weight quickly." "At 12 months, Atkins was still the winner, the authors said. The average weight loss was about 10 pounds. The Ornish diet resulted in a loss of about 5 pounds; the Zone diet came in last with a 3.5-pound loss. But the paper's abstract wasn't true to the actual results." "The Atkins and Ornish data have overlapping confidence intervals. This is a measure of statistical strength given sample size and other factors. The study implies that, with 95-percent confidence, the true weight loss could be as low as 6.8 pounds for the Atkins group and as high as 8.2 pounds for the Ornish group." "In fact, the Ornish dieters were closing the gap at 12 months as the Atkins dieters were gaining weight. This supports earlier studies suggesting that a low-fat lifestyle is better at keeping off weight in the long run." "Dean Ornish, creator of the Ornish diet, can be ornery when his diet is attacked, and he rightfully pointed out that the Stanford study, like so many studies before it, didn't really test his diet. Ornish advises dieters to limit fat to only 10 percent of the energy intake. For a 2,000-calorie diet, that's only 200 calories or about 22 grams of fat per day. " "The Stanford dieters didn't get to this level. After all, it's hard. Try being Italian on the Ornish diet when two tablespoons of olive oil contains 22 grams of fat. " "So why not go with Atkins if you can loose weight and eat bacon? The reason, most doctors say, is because there is something perverse about the Atkins diet." "Consider the breakfast of a gentleman on the Atkins diet whom I encounter each morning on a commuter train eating an entire block of baloney right out of the
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