Low-carb or low-fat: Which is better for you?

The study was designed to determine which diet is better, the low-fat or the low-carb, but no clear-cut patterns emerged. As a result, you’d think there’d be little to write about.

Think again.

The lack of clear-cut results clearly aligns with a theory of mine I first proposed more than 30 years ago and have written about dozens of times since then. I call it The Snowflake Theory of Dieting primarily because of what Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, avid snowflake photographer, and creator of SnowCrystals.com believes.

“It’s unlikely that any two complex snow crystals, out of all those made over the entire history of the planet, have ever looked completely alike.” (There are other experts, though, who beg to differ.)

It’s an unlikelihood that Libbrecht analogizes this way: “It’s like shuffling a deck and getting the exact same shuffle for 52 cards. You could shuffle every second for the entire life of the universe, and you wouldn’t come close to getting two of the same.”

That’s how unique I believe the absolutely most effective diet — the one that would allow you to reach your 100th birthday with a sharp mind and a fully functioning body — is to you. That’s why I’m forever sharing eating strategies that work for me along with this caveat: If you try them, you must be willing to tweak them again and again and again so that they work best for you.

While the tweaking may not allow you to become the psycho cycling centenarian I fully plan to be a little less than 43 years from now, it will certainly make the years before your demise healthier than if you mindlessly follow one of those one-size-fits-all diets.

Those less-than-definitive results about low-fat and low-carb diets that the researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine recently got published in JAMA help explain why. They took 609 people from the ages of 18 to 50 and for a full year had half follow a low-carb diet and half follow one low in fat.

Initially, the dietary restrictions were severe. Those following the low-carb diet could consume no more than 20 grams of carbs per day for the first 8 weeks; those following the low-fat, no more than 20 grams of fat.

After that, individuals were allowed to make minor, incremental 5-to-15-gram increases of the restricted element an attempt to create a diet that, according to Professor Christopher Gardner, lead author of the study, “they could potentially follow forever.”

Maybe it was this degree of freedom given to the subjects that created such dramatically different results; dramatically different is the only way to characterize them. At year’s end, some subjects shed more than 60 pounds, yet others gained up to 20.

Furthermore, the gains and the losses followed no pattern. The low-carb diet was just as likely to produce the dramatic weight loss as the low-fat diet, but the same held true for unexpected weight gain.

In fact, clear-cut patterns still didn’t emerge even when the researchers considered genetics and insulin production, which caused Gardner to write: “Maybe we shouldn’t be asking what’s the best diet, but what’s the best diet for whom?”

Gardner’s observation is spot-on (including his use of “whom”) and here’s why. Recent research has demonstrated that the interaction between what you eat and your genetic disposition is what an article in the February issue of Environmental Nutrition calls a “two-way street.”

In other words, you may have a genetic disposition towards carrying extra fat in the hips, but certain foods turn those genes on and — just as importantly! — certain foods have the ability to turn them off.

While it’s my best guess that knowing exactly how each and every food affects you probably isn’t occurring in your lifetime, that shouldn’t stop you from experimenting with your diet — especially with the percentages of your calories that come from the three macronutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

Your body produces insulin, which is needed to store fat, and glucagon, which is needed to burn fat, based on the ratio of fat, protein, and carbs you consume.

Ingest simple carbs in isolation, and your body produces so much insulin that those cals are just as likely to be stored as fat as used for immediate energy. But eat those simple carbs along with protein, some fat, and even some complex carbs, and insulin production moderates, increasing the likelihood that those simple carbs become immediate energy.

The experimenting you need to do revolves around what ratios of the macronutrients work best for you in specific situations — ratios often based on your body type and your activity level.

For me, for instance, a far higher percentage of protein than most medicos would suggest — between 40 and 50 percent of my total cals on days I limit my workouts to one hour — keeps me lean. Yet on those days when my exercise exceeds three hours, I must dramatically increase my carbohydrate consumption — so much so that it drops my protein percentage below 30 percent — or I suffer for days afterwards, and especially during workouts.