LOSE a stone and a half in just 12 weeks and not feel hungry? It sounds like the stuff of diet fantasy, yet add to this the bonus that you could also reduce your risk of heart disease and diabetes at the same time, and you have the fantastic promise being made to dieters by leading Australian scientists. For they have discovered a proven — yet simple — formula which, although it might not guarantee you the bronzed, honed body of an Australian beach babe, will help you to get rid of that unwanted spare tyre around your midriff.
Their programme, the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet (TWD), has already been a huge success in Australia — more than 200,000 copies have been sold in less than two months, knocking The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from their No 1 position. To keep up with demand, the book has also already undergone four reprints.
The diet’s biggest selling point, undoubtedly, is that it was borne of studies conducted at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the country’s government-funded research laboratories. Researchers there created the diet after they published clinical trials which found that reducing carbohydrates and increasing protein not only promoted fat loss, but also staved off hunger and was good for the dieter’s health.
So far, so Atkins, you might think. But there the similarities end. Whereas devotees of Atkins shunned carbohydrates completely, replacing them with unlimited amounts of proteins and fat, the TWD is high-protein but, crucially, low in fat and allows a moderate carbohydrate intake. Unlike the Atkins approach, says Dr Peter Clifton, CSIRO’s nutrition clinic director and one of the author’s of the TWD, “it has abundant fruit and vegetables, and plasma folate levels are maintained as a result”. Folates are thought to be important for helping to ward off heart disease. “It is very different from the Atkins, which is high in fat and may raise cholesterol levels, especially if little weight is lost,” he adds.
Apparently the TWD has none of the other side-effects associated with extreme high-protein diets — energy slump, headaches, constipation, bad breath or kidney stones. Nor do you have to go hungry. Clifton says the diet is “nutritionally balanced” — it does not cut out any food groups — and contains some slow-release or low-GI carbohydrates that are essential for sustaining energy and keeping blood sugar even. Another bonus of the TWD is that it has none of the convoluted calculations demanded by the GI diet.
On the diet you eat lean red meat (beef, veal or lamb) is eaten four times a week and fish or poultry every day for lunch. But typically, a daily diet plan will also include the most anti-Atkins of foods — bread, fresh fruit and vegetables and even a glass of wine — to make up the 1,340 calories you are allowed to consume. If, after 12 weeks, you reach your target weight, you can progress to a less rigid maintenance plan in which small amounts of carbohydrate (sweet potato, bread, cereals and pasta) are introduced.
What’s remarkable in the highly competitive world of weight-loss wars is that the authors did not set out to make millions from a new dieting phenomenon, but rather almost stumbled upon it. Dr Manny Noakes, CSIRO’s senior research dietician, and Clifton had spent the past eight years investigating how diet could help to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. Inevitably, their research involved helping obese subjects to shed weight to improve their health. Yet, when Noakes and Clifton began searching for a diet plan with scientific backing to show how and why it worked, they hit a wall. “We kept getting asked by dietitians about the evidence for different weight-loss diets, and when we examined the literature we found that there was relatively little to go on,” says Noakes. “The problem is that while fad diets might work for an individual, they have never been subjected to clinical trials to see if they work for the masses.” So, to find one that worked, they set about conducting their own trials into a range of popular diets, from low-calorie to Atkins and Pritikin to meal replacement, and published about 26 papers analysing their findings. What emerged was that low-fat, high-protein approaches were significantly better at getting rid of weight, but also in improving overall health.
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In the latest of these, published in June’s American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Noakes and her colleagues looked at 120 overweight women who were asked to follow one of two diets: high-protein and low-fat or high carbohydrate and low-fat. The researchers were particularly interested in monitoring female subjects with metabolic syndrome, or syndrome X, a collection of metabolic problems linked to diabetes and heart disease and indicated by fat accumulation around the tummy, high blood pressure and high levels of fats, or triglycerides, in the blood. After 12 weeks on their respective diets, the women were all lighter. But those on the high-protein, low-fat diet lost 25 per cent more weight (an average of 20lb or 9.07kg in total) than those on the high-carb diet.
Equally impressive, though, were the long-term health benefits. Subjects on the high-protein diet not only lost much of their fat from the abdominal area but also displayed a greater reduction in levels of blood triglycerides. While both diets helped to lower LDL cholesterol, the high-protein approach resulted in the beneficial lowering of insulin and blood glucose levels. Three times as many volunteers on the high-carb diet dropped out of the study before it finished, a factor that could be linked to protein’s ability to control hunger.
It is the diet’s influence on satiety levels, says Noakes, that is key to its success. “One of the most intriguing areas is how protein can affect appetite regulation in the brain,” she says. “It is a subtle effect, but was clearly obvious in the trials we carried out. So, three hours after a meal you will feel far less hungry after eating a lot of protein than if you ate the same number of calories from carbohydrate.” She concedes that “anyone will lose weight on any diet if they expend more calories than they consume”, but that the TWD helps people to achieve that by leaving them less hungry for more.
British experts seem impressed with what they have heard. Frankie Phillips, spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, says “bringing in the low-fat element to a high-protein diet is a very positive move and distinguishes it from other high-protein diets,” and, she adds, “it seems healthy”. But there has been some concern expressed in the Australian media about the diet: on CSIRO’s website is a postscript explaining that the diet is a result of studies funded by Meat and Livestock Australia and Dairy Australia, organisations that must be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of a sharp upturn in revenue as sales of the diet soar.
Noakes and Clifton insist that their trials in this area are unbiased. “We really thought long and hard about going down the diet book route,” Noakes says. “Initially we felt uncomfortable with that. But we were besieged with inquiries and realised that the credibility of the CSIRO made people realise that there must be something in this approach that works.”
The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet by Manny Noakes, published by Penguin on August 25, at £9.99
THE NON-HUNGER DIET: A TYPICAL DAY
Breakfast: Small bowl of high-fibre breakfast cereal (such as All Bran) with 250ml skimmed milk and one sliced banana
Lunch: 2 slices wholegrain bread with 100 grams turkey, cranberry sauce and lettuce with one slice of low-fat cheese. A piece of fresh fruit.
Dinner: Coat a 200g chicken breast fillet in Moroccan spices, fry in 2 tsp canola oil. Serve with steamed sweetcorn, broccoli and pumpkin.
‘Free’ foods: The following foods and drinks can be consumed in unlimited amounts every day: green, red, orange and yellow vegetables (apart from potatoes and sweet potatoes); diet drinks, plain mineral water, tea, coffee, cocoa, clear soups, diet jelly, oil-free salad dressing, herbs, spices, Vegemite and sauces (such as tomato, chilli and soy).
Total calories: Around 1,340 a day.
