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Diet, exercise take off equal pounds, study finds
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 26 - 01 - 2007


Eating less and exercising
more are equally good at helping take off the pounds, U.S.
researchers said on Friday in a study that challenges many of
the popular tenets of the multibillion dollar diet and fitness
industry, Reuters reported.
Tests on overweight people show that a calorie is just a
calorie, whether lost by dieting or by running, they said.
They found there is no way to selectively lose belly fat,
for instance, or trim thighs. And their carefully controlled
study added to evidence that adding muscle mass does not
somehow boost metabolism and help dieters take off even more
weight.
"It's all about the calories," said Dr. Eric Ravussin of
the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, part of Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge.
"So long as the energy deficit is the same, body weight,
fat weight, and abdominal fat will all decrease in the same
way."
Ravussin said the study, published in the Journal of
Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, is one of the few done
under controlled conditions that can actually demonstrate what
happens to a human body while dieting and exercising.
Ravussin's team has been testing volunteers for another
reason -- to see if taking in fewer calories helps people live
longer. Strict diets have been shown to help animals from worms
to dogs live longer, but it takes longer to study monkeys and
humans.
They tested 24 people, 12 who ate a calorie-restricted
diet, and 12 who dieted and also exercised five times a week
for six months.
The dieters ate 25 percent less than normal, while the
exercisers reduced their calorie intake by 12.5 percent and
increased their physical activity to lose an extra 12.5 percent
in calories.
Another 10 volunteers acted as controls. All food was
provided by the university in carefully measured portions for
most of the study.
The volunteers in both groups lost about 10 percent of
their body weight, 24 percent of their fat mass, and 27 percent
of their abdominal visceral fat. Visceral fat is packed in
between the internal organs and is considered the most
dangerous type of fat, linked with heart disease and diabetes.
The distribution of the fat on the body was not altered by
either approach -- helping prove that there is no such thing as
"spot reducing", Ravussin said in a telephone interview.
This suggests that "individuals are genetically programmed
for fat storage in a particular pattern and that this
programming cannot easily be overcome," he added.
Ravussin has published other studies that also dispute the
idea that exercise builds muscle that helps people lose
weight.
"If anything, highly trained people are highly efficient,
so they burn fewer calories at rest," Ravussin said.
Dieting alone also did not appear to cause the volunteers
to lose muscle mass along with fat, Ravussin's team found.
"There is a concept that if you exercise, you are going to
lose less of your muscle," he said. But his team found no
evidence this is true.
Ravussin believes exercise is crucial to health, however.
"For overall health, an appropriate program of diet and
exercise is still the best," he said.
His team found some small suggestion that cutting 25
percent of calories by either diet or diet and exercise might
extend life.
"We found that 2 of the biomarkers of aging were improved
-- core temperature was 0.4 to 0.5 degrees C less," he said.
"Insulin, which has been shown to be a biomarker of aging, was
reduced," Ravussin said. That finding was published in the
Journal of the American Medical Associaton last April.


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