2017 March Board Book

But Teicholz and others who criticize traditional low-fat wisdom get a lot of pushback. When Teicholz argued in the BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, that the committee assigned to develop the recent dietary guidelines "abandoned established methods for most of its analyses," the nutrition advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest called her article a "discredited and opinionated attack" and demanded a retraction. (After the BMJ had two scientists review Teicholz's original article, it recently announced it would stand by the article.)

The question remains whether it's better to stick to a low-fat or a low-carb diet to lose weight and stay healthy. For Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine at Stanford Prevention Research Center, it depends on a lot of complex factors.

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Gardner is wrapping up a five-year study that included putting 600 overweight and obese adults on either a low-fat diet or low-carb diet for a year, depending on which one they thought would be most successful based on each subject's insulin resistance. They weren't given a specific guidance on calorie restrictions, but the average reduction was 500 calories per day.

Overall, the weight-loss results of each diet were almost identical, says Gardner. What surprised him most was how different people responded within each diet. In one group,