Wondering if a low-fat diet has long term benefit? Well, yes. In a new study, researchers have found a number of benefits the diet carries for women. “While there are many diets that provide short-term benefits like weight loss, this study scientifically validates the long-term health effects of a low-fat diet,” said Dr Garnet Anderson, a co-author of the study and senior vice president and director of Fred Hutch’s Public Health Sciences Division.
The findings of the study were published in the Journal of Nutrition.Researchers found that low-fat diet commensurate with an increase in fruit, vegetable and grain servings reduced death following breast cancer, slowed diabetes progression and prevented coronary heart disease.
For the study, researchers incorporated nearly 49,000 postmenopausal women across the US to test whether a low-fat dietary pattern would reduce the risk of breast and colorectal cancers and coronary heart disease.
After nearly nine years of dietary change, they found that the low-fat diet didn’t significantly impact outcomes for these conditions. However, after a longer-term follow-up of nearly 20 years, they found significant benefits, derived from modest dietary changes.
The diet showed a 15-35 per cent reduction in deaths from all-causes following breast cancer, a 13-25 per cent reduction in insulin-dependent diabetes and a 15-30 per cent reduction in coronary heart disease among 23,000 women without baseline hypertension or prior cardiovascular disease.”The latest results support the role of nutrition in overall health, and indicate that low-fat diets rich in fruits, vegetables and grains have health benefits without any observed adverse effects,” said Dr. Ross Prentice, member of the Cancer Prevention and Biostatistics programs at Fred Hutch and his colleagues in the Women’s Health Initiative.Unlike other studies examining the link between diet, cancer and other diseases, WHI investigators designed the study as a long-term, randomised controlled clinical trial to limit bias and establish causal conclusions. Participants made intentional dietary changes resulting from learned integrated concepts about nutrition and behaviour, taught by trained nutritionists during the first year and reinforced quarterly for nearly a decade. “The sheer number of new diets and nutrition trends can be overwhelming to people who simply want to know, ‘What should I be eating?'” said Anderson.Current nutritional guidelines from the NIH suggest that only 20 to 35 percent of your total daily intake should come from fat. For the average 2,000-calorie-a-day maintenance diet, that means about 400 to 700 calories, or 44 to 77 grams of total fat per day. Want to follow a low-fat diet? Aim for the low end of that range, with most of the fat in your diet coming from unsaturated sources. To keep saturated fat to 10 percent of your total intake, limit it to 200 calories or 22 grams of fat per day, taken from your daily fat allowance.On a weight-loss diet of 1,200 calories, limiting fats to only 20 percent of total daily intake means you can have 240 calories, or 26 grams, of fat each day, with a maximum of 120 calories, or 13 grams, coming from saturated fat. That leaves you nearly 1,000 calories to “spend” on protein and carbohydrates.While it’s hard to know exactly how many fat grams are in a piece of red meat (you can estimate using a calorie-counting guidebook), for packaged foods, the nutritional label tells you everything you need to know, including total fat grams and calories, and the grams and calories of any saturated and trans fat in the food.“A low-fat diet includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and proteins such as lean meat and fish,” says Tera Fridley, RD, LD, clinical nutrition manager at AVI Foodsystems, Hillcrest Hospital, a Cleveland Clinic hospital in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. How you prepare food is important. Use low-fat methods — baked, roasted, or broiled instead of deep-fried. “You can eat all kinds of delicious foods on a low-fat diet,” Fridley says. “If you have a favorite food that’s high in fat, you can still enjoy it in moderation.”An ultra-low-fat — or very-low-fat — diet allows for no more than 10% of calories from fat. It also tends to be low in protein and very high in carbs — with about 10% and 80% of daily calories, respectively.Ultra-low-fat diets are mostly plant-based and limit your intake of animal products, such as eggs, meat, and full-fat dairy (6Trusted Source). High-fat plant foods — including extra virgin olive oil, nuts, and avocados — are also often restricted, even though they’re generally perceived as healthy.This can be problematic, as fat serves several important functions in your body.Plus, fat makes food taste good. A diet very low in fat is generally not as pleasurable as one that’s moderate or high in this nutrient.
