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Low-Glycemic-Load Diet: Potential Benefits

A low-glycemic-load diet showed some advantages over a low-fat diet in a small randomized trial.

Some have theorized that, compared with a low-fat diet, a low-glycemic-load diet promotes fewer physiologic responses to calorie restriction and enables dieters to maintain more normal resting energy expenditure and, thereby, to lose weight and reduce cardiovascular risk more easily. Prompted by this theory, researchers randomized 46 adults (minimum body-mass index, 27) to either a low-fat or a low-glycemic-index diet until they lost 10% of their initial body weight. An example of a lower-glycemic-load food is fruit (instead of fruit juice). Both diets involved calorie restriction.

On average, achieving 10% weight loss took 9 to 10 weeks in the 39 subjects who completed the study. The two diets yielded similar favorable changes in weight, body composition, HDL cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol. However, the low-glycemic-load diet was associated with a significantly smaller mean decrease in resting energy expenditure and with significantly greater mean reductions in triglycerides, mean arterial blood pressure, C-reactive protein levels, and insulin resistance (according to a homeostasis-model assessment score). On average, the low-glycemic-load dieters also reported less hunger than the low-fat dieters.

Comment: In this small, hypothesis-generating study, short-term use of either a low-glycemic-load diet or a low-fat diet produced weight loss. However, the low-glycemic-load diet was associated with significantly greater reductions in some important cardiovascular risk factors. Further research must determine the sustainability of these results, as well as their effects on long-term clinical outcomes.

— JoAnne M. Foody, MD

Published in Journal Watch Cardiology January 21, 2005

Citation(s):

Pereira MA et al. Effects of a low-glycemic load diet on resting energy expenditure and heart disease risk factors during weight loss. JAMA 2004 Nov 24; 292:2482-90.

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