Another interesting bit of data about refined grains and weight gain: researchers at Tufts have discovered that people who eat more refined grains put on weight around their middles.
The belt size of the white bread group expanded about one-half inch a year, which probably put some of the research subjects into a larger size of pants over the three years they were tracked, Tucker said. At the end, the white bread group had three times the fiber group's gain at the gut.
This seems to back up my current dietary theory: the fewer steps a food takes from its natural form, the better it is for you. So low-carb diets aside, it's OK to eat a whole pile of raw peas, for example, but you should really limit your consumption of things made with white flour. All that energy that goes into making a food white or smooth or whatever will be stored in your body.
In other dietary news, CNN had a little bit about low-carb diets over the years, and included this gem:
Most recently, a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that over six months, dieters in a low-carb plan lost more weight than participants in a low-fat regimen. But in the same journal, other research showed that after a year, both the low-carb and low-fat groups had lost about the same amount of weight.
