Low-fat diet can help even runners lose weight, says expert

• Eat less fat, and you should lose both pudginess and pounds.
• In cases in which dietary intake is unregulated (i. e., when humans are eating as they please), a propensity to ingest fat could easily lead to an excessive consumption of energy and a gain in body weight.
• In addition, many people seem to believe that fat increases the flavor and overall palatability of comestibles and thus are very attracted to foods which have a substantial fat content.
• For individuals with such inclinations (and a lack of expertise in the use of herbs and spices to make edibles more exciting), fat-free foods can be rather bland and tasteless.
• If this view is correct, and there is evidence to support it, individuals who enjoy eating fatty foods would tend to take in a greater amount of total energy in order to obtain their mandated amounts of carbohydrate, compared with people on low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets.
• In the short-term trials which have been conducted (i. e., in those investigations lasting six months or less), small weight losses are observed when 10 to 15 percent of the energy usually obtained from fat is replaced by energy from carbohydrate (11).
• Over the course of a year and one-half, such paring would lop nearly 19 pounds of lard from the average person; after four years, a ton of tallow would be lost (just kidding - the real loss would be around 51 pounds per capita).
• The single, double-blind, long-term investigation of fat reduction and body weight is the National Diet Heart Study (12), an investigation in which foods with differing fat content were provided to 900 subjects.
• Members of the "high-fat" group obtained about 35 percent of total calories from fat (very close to current American intake patterns), while individuals in the "low-fat" collection of subjects received 30 percent of calories from lipid.