Are we surprised?

Adherence to diet for one year, not the specific diet plan, determines your weight loss and reduction of cardiovascular risk, according to the results of a randomized trial published in the Jan. 5, 2005 issue of JAMA. When comparing Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone diets, the author recommends the "low fad" approach.

One hundred sixty obese adults were studied and randomly placed in the different diet plans. Guess what. Low adherence in each group! But those who stuck with it a year, regardless of the plan, benefited with better health.

"One way to improve dietary adherence rates in clinical practice may be to use a broad spectrum of diet options, to better match individual patient food preferences, lifestyles, and cardiovascular risk profiles," the authors conclude. "Our findings challenge the concept that one type of diet is best for everybody and that alternative diets can be disregarded. Likewise, our findings do not support the notion that very low carbohydrate diets are better than standard diets, despite recent evidence to the contrary."