Obesity is a condition that affects a significant portion of people throughout the world; as a result, a whole industry of “get rid of obesity” emerged, each offering its own “unfailable” method that just has to work. However, until now, nobody conducted a extremely thorough study to pinpoint exactly what you have to do to have a healthy diet. A team of scientists from eight European research centres and headed by Thomas Meinert Larsen solved that problem.

The results are quite clear amd simple: if you want to lose weight and be healthier, you have to eat foods rich in protein with more lean meat, low-fat dairy products and beans and fewer finely refined starch calories such as white bread and white rice. However, this extensive study concludes that following these recommandations are not enough to prevent obesity – they are however the best dietary guidelines.

This study called Diogenes (you gotta love the irony) investigated a huge number of cases in order to find out what the optimum diet composition for preventing and treating obesity is. A total of 772 families were investigated during the nutrition study. The bottom line was that they came up with five different ways of healthy diet types:

* A low-protein diet (13% of energy consumed) with a high glycemic index (GI)*

* A low-protein, low-GI diet

* A high-protein (25% of energy consumed), low-GI diet

* A high-protein, high-GI diet

* A control group which followed the current dietary recommendations without special instructions regarding glycemic index levels

Out of these five, the best and most recommended is the low-protein low-GI diet.

Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!