Low carb diet leads to unhappy weight loss

Following a very low carbohydrate diet for weight loss may have a negative impact on mood compared to conventional low fat diets despite similar weight loss results, research shows. After randomising 118 obese people aged 24 to 64 to either a low fat or low carbohydrate restricted energy diet, researchers followed participants for 12 months and measured both body weight and mood scores. While mood scores for both groups improved dramatically in the first eight weeks, this may be due to associated early weight loss, the study authors said. Of the 55 people who completed the trial, researchers found participants in the low fat group maintained the improvement over the course of the trial, while mood scores in the low carbohydrate group returned towards more negative baseline levels. "This outcome suggests that some aspects of the low-carbohydrate diet may have had detrimental effects on mood that, over the term of one year, negated any positive effects of weight loss," the authors wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine. This may be due the difficult nature of adhering to a restrictive diet or neurological reasons such as the effects of the diet on serotonin levels, researchers said. As both groups recorded similar scores in cognitive tests over the study there was no evidence the dietary composition of either diet effected cognitive functioning. Arch Intern Med 2009;169:1873-1880.  ...