Surprising study names which diet beats Mediterranean and low-fat diets for liver and metabolic health

Most Americans are overweight.Whether the goal is to live longer, ease joint pain, breathe easier, or feel more confident, it’s no surprise as many as 42% of us are trying to lose weight.Even if you choose to get on a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Zepbound, doctors recommend the medication be paired with lifestyle changes.Diet is one of the most important changes you can make for weight loss.But where should you start? The main contenders include Mediterranean, keto, and plant-forward diets.Researchers in a new study pitted the three against each other.

While all helped people lose weight, one came out with clear benefits that went beyond shedding pounds.The authors picked the three popular diets that provide vastly different nutrients.The keto (aka Atkins) diet emphasizes healthy fats while severely restricting carbs (to about 4% of calories), encouraging the body to burn fat.A plant-forward diet does the opposite, emphasizing carbs (70% of calories) while minimizing fat, to focus on whole plant foods and minimizing animal products.The Mediterranean diet falls somewhere in the middle.About half the calories comes from carbs, a third from fat, and about a fifth from protein.Participants in this new research had obesity, pre-diabetes and fatty liver disease, and were each randomly assigned to one of the three diets.

All their food was delivered from the researchers.Researchers tailored the calorie intake so all participants lost about 10% of their body weight over the course of four to five months.All three diets were successful in helping participants lose weight, drop body fat, increase their sensitivity to insulin (over time low sensitivity leads to diabetes) and improve blood sugar control.One diet produced the greatest improvements in liver and metabolic health: keto, the high fat, low carb diet.In people with obesity, excess body fat increases the release of fatty acids into the bloodstream, which gets absorbed into the liver.This causes fatty liver disease, which...