No Cola or no bacon?

Hard to say ...

Staying out of junk food is the hardest drudgery.

A team at Stanford University Medical School made a year-long research comparing four popular diets, from low-carb to low-fat, and the Atkins resulted to be the best.

Thus, in the end, meat lovers laugh at vegetarians. The research incorporated 311 overweight, premenopausal women with equal body statistics on one of four diets: Atkins (very low-carb), the Zone (low-carb), the LEARN diet (low-fat, national guidelines) and the Ornish diet (very low-fat).

After six months, the 70-some women on the Atkins diet had lost the largest amount of bodyweight. "At 12 months, Atkins was still the winner," the authors said. The average weight loss was around 10 pounds (4 kg); the Ornish diet led to a 5 pounds (2 kg) loss; the Zone diet induced 3.5-pound (1.4 kg) loss.

But the results of the research were somehow biased by a weaker statistical strength due to the sample size and other factors. With 95 % confidence, the real weight loss could be just 6.8 pounds (2.7 kg) for the Atkins and as high as 8.2 pounds (3.3 kg) for the Ornish group.

Actually, the Ornish dieters were stabilized at 12 months while the Atkins dieters were gaining weight.

Thus a low-fat lifestyle is more effective at keeping off weight in the long run. Dean Ornish, who created the Ornish diet said the research didn't really check his diet and his advice on the fact that fat must represent just 10 % of the energy intake. At a 2,000-calorie diet, 200 calories represented by fat translated to 22 grams of fat daily, a level not achieved by this research.

That's why Atkins is easier to carry on as it allows you to eat meat. But this can be deceptive as a huge array of studies link heart disease and cancer with saturated fat rich diets, abundant in beef and pork. Moreover, the acidity from a high-animal-protein diet can cause osteoporosis: even Robert Atkins died due to a skull fracture from slipping on the ice.