After eating only traces of carbohydrates for 2 weeks, 10 obese patients with type 2 diabetes lost an average of 3.6 pounds, suggesting that a low-carbohydrate diet works in the short-term, according to study findings released Monday.

Although participants could eat as much protein and fat as they wanted during the diet, they averaged 1,000 fewer calories each day, which was probably the key factor in their weight loss, the lead author told AMN Health.

The low-carbohydrate diets or the Atkins diet work in the short term because followers “lose weight, and the reason they do is because they eat less,” said Dr. Guenther Boden of Temple University in Philadelphia.

Boden cautioned that the two-week diet was “very drastic.” People were allowed to eat only 20 grams of carbohydrates per day - practically no carbohydrates, he said. “There’s no way you could stick to this for any length of time.”

Consequently, Boden noted that for people who want to lose a little bit of weight - perhaps 20 pounds - it makes more sense to cut carbohydrates to “a reasonable amount.”

During the study, Boden and his team asked 10 obese people with type 2 diabetes - the most common form of the disease - to follow their usual diets for 7 days, and then cut out practically all carbohydrates for the next 14 days.

While eating their usual diets, people consumed approximately 3100 calories each day. During the 14-day diet, however, they averaged only 2100 calories per day, and lost almost 4 pounds in 2 weeks.

Boden explained that the amount of calories people ate on the low-carb diet matched what they should eat, based on their height. “By taking the carbs away, they adjusted their excessive caloric intake to a normal caloric intake, spontaneously,” he said.

As a result, he suggested that there may be something in carbohydrates that fuels appetite, given that that was the only factor that changed in the experiment.

Cutting carbs appeared to also help normalize diabetics’ blood sugar, so much so that some patients had to reduce their diabetes medication, Boden added. “For diabetics, you get an additional benefit,” he said.

The authors also carefully measured how many calories people burned on daily activities while on the different diets, and found they did not increase their expenditures while eating low-carb fare. Changes in water weight also did not explain the weight loss, the authors report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Boden said that he and his colleagues did not accept any financial backing from Atkins Nutritionals, the well-known promoter of the low-carbohydrate diet.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. George A. Bray, of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, notes that previous research has shown low-carb dieters tend to initially lose more weight than other dieters, but those differences vanish after one year.

If one diet could “cure” obesity, researchers would have discovered it by now, given the amount of time they’ve spent investigating the subject, Bray adds.

All diets limit food choices, he notes. “I am thus not convinced that one diet has any more value than another - they all have value,” Bray writes.

SOURCE: Annals of Internal Medicine, March 15, 2005.