What do the Atkins Diet and the traditional Japanese diet have in common? The Atkins Diet is low in carbohydrate and usually high in fat; the Japanese diet is high in carbohydrate and usually low in fat. Yet both work to promote weight loss. One commonality of both diets is that they both eliminate the monosaccharide fructose. Sucrose (table sugar) and its synthetic sister high fructose corn sy...

The most popular high protein diets are 'Atkins Diet', the 'Zone Diet', and 'Sugar Busters!'. Another eating plan that has been given some exposure on Australian TV is the 'Slim Forever' diet. The inventors of these diets make different claims about their effects on health, ranging from weight loss to massive reduction in disease risk and vastly increased life expectancy. The concept that it ma...

Obesity has become a serious public health problem worldwide, and dietary composition can play a role in its prevention and treatment. However, available literature on the impacts of different dietary factors on weight change is inconsistent, or even conflicting. In this review, we briefly summarized the mechanisms and influences of several major dietary determinants of weight change, with a fo...

If you were going on a weight loss diet, as so many of us have, you would ask a few hard questions about any program that a friend or physician asked you to try. First, you would want to know what the diet is (“Atkins? South Beach? What’s that?”) Next, you would want to know if it works (“How much weight have people lost on that diet? Really?!”) Finally, you might ask, what do I need to do to m...