Need to lose weight - try a vegan diet

In Eat carbs, lose weight – lessons from a vegan diet Paula Goodyer reports that those participants in a small study found those on a vegan diet lost double the weight of those on diets including meat or fish.

It seems a vegan diet can also carry other health benefits:

It's not the first study to show weight loss success on a diet based entirely on plants. Six years ago I interviewed  Dr Neal Barnard, Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at George Washington School of Medicine, about his research looking at using a plant food-only diet to control type 2 diabetes. He found that besides controlling blood glucose more effectively than the standard American Diabetes Association diet, the diet also helped reduce weight and cholesterol.

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What about the argument that eating a lot of carbohydrates forces the body to produce too much insulin, which in turn encourages the body to store fat more easily?

"If this was the case, we wouldn't have studies consistently showing that vegetarians, who typically eat more carbohydrate, have better insulin sensitivity, a reduced risk of diabetes and heart disease and are less likely to be overweight," she says.

But another advantage of a vegan diet may have something to do with the kind of bacteria that reside in a gut where the only available food comes from plants. New research from the City University of New York has found that the gut microbe population of people on a vegan diet is different to that of omnivores and includes more of the microbes thought to help protect against obesity and diabetes.