Do you know the internal organ that makes you fat?
The more complex answer: Although on a molecular level, fat and carbohydrates have different effects on the body once they are ingested, when it comes to weight loss, low-fat diets and low-carb diets are equally effective, although most of the time, neither one helps you to keep the weight off long-term. That's the word from Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, who told TIME magazine, who insists a calorie is calorie--no matter where it comes from.
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"There are some interesting questions about whether eating carbohydrate calories versus fat calories will make you eat more calories, but based on what you put into your mouth, it's pretty clear that the source of the calories is really not important," Willett explained to TIME. He said the more important question is whether the diet provides satiety so you'll eat less during the day.
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One warning about trans fats: In a recent five-year study with monkeys, it was shown that trans fats can cause weight gain. The monkeys on a high trans-fat diet gained about 7 percent of their body weight over a five-year period, compared to the monkeys on a low-trans-fat diet, who gained about 1.5 percent of their body weight over five years, reports TIME. "So there may be something more complicated going on there. It may be that on the high-trans-fat diet you're more likely to push those calories into your fat cells rather than your muscle cells--and muscles burn calories 24 hours a day. In the long run, that could make a difference in weight gain. But that's speculation. We're really not sure," says Willett.
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