New study: People who eat carbs tend to be thinner

I happen to have a weakness for bread. At dinner, I’m that person who’s a little unsettled until the rolls get there. I’ll go on: I find grains filling (without making you want to reach for a whole lot more; I get sated after a piece or two), comforting (carbohydrates have time and again been shown to raise our serotonin levels, making us feel happy and cozy), and—frankly—they offer me something engaging to do with my hands.

In my head, I’ve been viewing my love of bread as something to work around (yes, some whole grains are good—but ideally, my sense has been to go for fewer and farther between).

So I guess it was vindicating (?) but mostly just interesting to read that I’m not entirely alone in having made this bread thing function somewhere between okay and well. A new study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that—up until you get to a ridiculously huge amount (290-310 grams per day)—the more carbohydrates people ate, the slimmer they were. The most slender participants got somewhere between 47 and 64 percent of their energy intake from carbs, and even those who ate more than the 290-310 tipping point amount of carbs weighed less than those who were consuming the absolute lowest amount (ie practically avoiding bread and its ilk altogether).

While the authors didn’t distinguish what kind of carbs people were eating, they did note that subjects who ate the most of them also had the highest intake of fruits, vegetables, and (metabolism-boosting) fiber. In other words, the carb-eaters also had the most balanced diets (this makes me think these weren’t necessarily candy-and-white bread people, either). About the results, the authors had this to say: “High protein/low-carbohydrate diets bring about greater weight loss in the short-term than diets emphasizing overall energy restriction, but there is no difference between diets in weight loss achieved at the end of 1 year.”

The effectiveness of eating what you like in moderation–and together with other healthy things–is probably more intuition than news. But to see just how well it works mapped out like that was, I think, pretty fascinating. I’d call this a very satisfying study.