Is it really just a matter of calories-in calories-out? Depends on what your goals are.

Here we go again. The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine recently published a comparison study of weight-loss diets that seems sure to shake up the Conventional Wisdom of weight loss one more time.  Many of the major news services covered this report since its conclusions upend the popularly-held belief in a high-protein (or practically any other type of weight-loss) diet.  Instead, the putatively surprising finding of this study was that it didn’t matter whether protein, carbs or fats were high or low; long-term weight loss success came down to simply calories-in versus calories out.   That is to say, manipulating protein fat and carb levels didn’t matter, what mattered was reducing overall calorie intake.  So what does this mean to the millions of people trying to lose weight? Is it time to rethink the high-protein low-carb approach? (more…)