NEW YORK - Cutting the carbs is a popular weight-loss method but adding extra fatty protein has raised questions about the toll this diet takes on your heart. Now, experts say dieters shouldn't worry, at least in the short-term.
It may not seem like the typical meal you would use to study heart health, but that's exactly what researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine did.
Researchers had a group of more than 40 overweight adults eat this 900-calorie McMeal and then took a close look at their arteries.
"We found no evidence that eating at least a single, high-fat meal had an adverse affect on vascular health," Kerry Stewart, Ed.D., Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Exercise Physiologist, said.
The McDonald's Challenge was part of a larger study of low-carbohydrate diets and their effect on heart health. Weight-loss plans like Atkins and South Beach claim to help users drop pounds fast, but how the heart reacts to high-fat, carb-free living has been unknown.
The same study group was also assigned to either a low-carb or low-fat diet plan for six months.
"They would have the same amount of calories, so that at the end of the day, the difference would be not how much weight they lost but how they achieved that weight loss," said Stewart.
The low-carb group lost 10 pounds nearly a month faster than the low-fat group. But, there was a more interesting development.
"There were absolutely no differences between the groups in terms of these vascular measures that we looked at," Stewart said.
Researchers say combining this finding - with those of the McDonald's meal study - proves high-fat, low-carb diets don't hurt the heart over a short period of time. What they don't know is whether it's healthy to cut the carbs for good.
The participants were also part of a supervised exercise program, and they did not have fast food every day. The study is still going on. These results are from the first three months participants were on the diet. The research is being presented at the American College of Sports Medicine Conference in Denver this week.
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