Are plant based diets an antidote to obesity?
Paula Goodyer
Despite all the hype around ketogenic diets and weight loss, new research presented at the recent European Congress on Obesity suggests that it’s diets high in plant foods and low in animal-based foods that may protect against obesity in the long term, especially in middle aged and older people.
Although there’s evidence that vegan or vegetarian diets reduce obesity risk, less is known about the effects of plant-based diets that include small amounts of animal products. To find out more, researchers from Erasmus University Medical Centre in The Netherlands looked at the association between a variety of plant-based diets and BMI, waist measurement and fat mass index in 9,641 middle aged and older people from the Rotterdam Study, an ongoing population study that has tracked food intake, BMI and waist measurement since 1989 and monitored fat mass and fat-free mass using DXA scanning since 2002.
The verdict? Those whose diets were highest in plant foods had a lower BMI over the long term.
This sounds like good news for cancer prevention in the light of other research presented at the conference which found that women with a high weight gain (an increase of 10 kilos or more over six years) were almost twice as likely to develop pancreatic cancer. Researchers from the Arctic University of Norway found that high weight gain was associated with a 36 % increased risk of postmenopausal breast cancer, a 40% increased risk of endometrial cancer and a 91% increased risk of pancreatic cancer.
Paula Goodyer is a Sydney-based health writer specialising in nutrition and fitness, and twice winner of the DAA Excellence in Nutrition Award