As skinny statue becomes a fashion trend today, weight losing becomes prevalent. Girls go on diets, or work out in the gyms, even take pills etc. I even thought about going on a diet to put on the skinny skirt. So how effective dieting really is in regard to weight losing?

The definition of diet is “to restrict oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight.” Dieters are picky about the food they consume. This article puts “cut back on sugars and starches” as the first step of losing weight and a study is conducted to compare the effect of low- fat (calorie restricted and hungry) and low- carbohydrate (eating until fullness) diets on body weight.

As the diagram shows, the low- carbohydrate group lose more weight. This means stay hungry and restrict intaking calorie actually don’t work as well as controlling the amount of carbohydrate in foods while eating until fullness. Dieting can be the right path of losing weight when low- carbohydrate meals are consumed, and eating as few foods as possible does not mean get rid of more body weight.

However, I found another study which has a totally inverse conclusion. People (29.0–44.6 kg/m2) recruited from Boston Medical Center were randomized to a hypocaloric LFHC (n=26) (LFHC: high fat, low carbohydrate) or HFLC (n=29) (HFLC: low fat, high carbohydrate) diet for 12 weeks. “The change in percent body weight, lean and fat mass, blood pressure, flow mediated dilation, hip:waist ratio, hemoglobin A1C, fasting insulin and glucose, and glucose and insulin response to a 2 h oral glucose tolerance test did not differ between diets after 12 weeks.”

I start reexamining the study process and compare the two studies. Though the second study provides more statistic information, it is not perfect — the sample is not large, so the small scale experiment may not be convincing enough. However, I think the second study is more credible because it takes precise measurements and it’s more scientific- rigorously conducted. It also utilizes statistics– “P- value >0.05” to reach the conclusion. As we studied in class, when P- value>0.05, we cannot reject the null hypothesis, so it is due to chance and nothing is happening. Even the case is so, another thing we studied in class reminds me that more studies should be conducted to determine the result, so I continued searching and found that there seemed to be no agreed answer on this topic.

Another well- conducted experiment I found on Google Scholar concludes that “The LCHF diet resulted in significantly greater weight loss than did the HCLF diet (7.8 ± 0.4 and 6.4 ± 0.4 kg, respectively; P = 0.04).” Also, it is randomly controlled trial, and applies statistics and measurements. Plus, the sample size of 93 objects is larger than that in the previous study. This time I feel difficult to determine which one is more credible, but it is still possible to figure out the truth because I agree with the study that “further studies are required to determine the replicability of this finding.”

At this point, I feel what we learnt in class can explain the case reasonably– conclusions from very large, well executed experiments of the best design possible can be wrong and the only way to work that out is to do more studies. Science is more of a process of exploring and discovering things, so we should never stop the steps of progressing.