Is there is a best vegetarian diet for weight loss? Yes, according to evidence-based science!
A group of colleagues from the University of South Carolina, published a randomised controlled trial study in 2018 (Reference 1).
The aim of this gold standard study was to evaluate the effect of plant-based diets on weight loss. Participants were enrolled in a 6-month study and divided by their type of diet.
The scientists included in the study; vegan, pesco-vegetarian, semi-vegetarian and omnivorous subjects respectively. Already by the second month of the study, vegan participants decreased their fat and saturated fat more than the pesco-vegetarian, semi-vegetarian, and omnivorous groups. At the end of the 6-month study, vegan participants lost 7.5% of total body weight compared to the other type of diets.
So those results confirm that veganism is the best vegetarian diet for weight loss.
And good news from another gold-standard meta-analysis study published in 2016 from a Harvard group of scientists (Reference 2). Their goals were to evaluate if vegetarian diets may promote weight loss. So, they studied 12 randomised controlled trials, involving a total of 1151 subjects who followed a vegetarian diet for an average of 18 weeks.
Overall individuals that followed a vegetarian diet lost significantly more weight than those on a non-vegetarian diet.
A more detailed analysis showed that subjects consuming a vegan diet lost on average of 2.52 kg and those having a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet lost only 1.48 Kg. Therefore, vegetarian diets appeared to have significant benefits on weight reduction compared to non-vegetarian diets, but further long-term trials are needed to investigate the effects of vegetarian diets on body weight control.
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