High Protein Diet can Help with Weight Loss

High protein diet can aid weight loss, a new study has found.

According to researchers at the University of Sydney, getting correct nutritional balance is more important than counting calories to achieve a healthy weight.

Kilojoules or kilocalories are used as a standard measurement of energy from food and these numbers are used to decide which type of food is healthy and which is not. Researchers said that this is a simplistic way of determining the nutritional value of food.

Different macronutrients such as carbohydrates, fats and proteins interact to regulate appetite. Increasing the quantity of one type of food over another could lead to several health problems.

"Foods are complex mixtures of nutrients and these do not act independently but interact with one another. The appetite systems for different nutrients compete in their influence on feeding," said David Raubenheimer, a nutritional ecologist at the University of Sydney who is one of the study authors.

These appetite systems stop competing with each other when diet is nutritionally balanced.

Researchers studied foraging behavior of baboons and found that all these animals tended to eat a balanced diet. Other research too has shown that spider-monkeys, orangutans and gorillas also tend to eat foods to maintain nutritional balance in diet rather than increase or decrease calories.

Sometimes, these animals had to under or over-eat a particular food to keep the diet nutritionally balanced. Also, the levels of protein, carbohydrate and fat required to make diet "healthy", differed from primate to primate.

According to the researchers, humans' diet plan is close to the diets followed by spider monkeys and orangutans. Humans prefer protein over carbohydrates, meaning that low levels of protein in diet leads to over consumption of carbohydrate and fat, according to a news release.

The level of protein consumption in the Western World has dropped in the past few decades and this may explain why obesity rates have gone up, researchers said.

Researchers warn against eating a lot of meat or other protein-rich foods. "We also need to get the balance of fats:carbs right...high protein diets might help us to lose weight, but if they involve other imbalances then other health problems will be introduced."

Recent studies have shown that diet high in meat protein increases cancer risk in middle-aged people.

The study was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology in Manchester on Friday July 4.

Raubenheimer concluded by saying that ultra-processed foods are a recent phenomenon and that human bodies are not adapted to eating cakes, biscuits and pizzas.