How Atkins Works

[FightingFat]

guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1637373,00.html

It’s not by avoiding insulin spikes the way Atkins said…

Finally, a scientific explanation for why eating endless steaks on the Atkins diet helps people lose weight: the masses of extra protein send messages to the brain to stop eating.

“The current findings provide an answer to the question of how protein-enriched meals decrease hunger and reduce eating, unsolved up to now,” said the researchers in a paper published today in Cell Metabolism.

According to Robert Atkins, the late founder of the most famous of the low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets that were hugely popular a year ago, the eating plan works because cutting down on carbohydrates prevents insulin peaks which cause sugar to be stored as fat, and increasing protein intake makes the kidneys work harder, using up more calories.

But his ideas have never held up experimentally - except for one. “It is well known that protein feeding decreases hunger sensation and subsequent food intake in animals and humans,” said Gilles Mithieux of the University of Lyon, one of the authors of the new research. A recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, for example, showed that people given a calorie-controlled diet where 30% of their calories came from proteins reported being less hungry than those put on diets where 15% of the calories came from protein. Even when the calorie restriction was lifted, people ate fewer calories on the high-protein diet.