low carb diet

Keep your mood high and your weight low. Fill two-thirds of your plate with plant-based foods, and the remaining third with lean protein.

Nice to eat you: Keeping carbs on the menu seems good for mood, a study shows.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA— Weight goes down, and mood goes up; mood and weight loss generally work like a seesaw. But a study published recently in the Archives of Internal Medicine found an exception to that rule in long-term followers of a low-carb diet: Their weight went down significantly—and their mood did, too.

THE DETAILS: Australian researchers from several different institutions recruited 106 overweight and obese men and women, whom they randomly assigned to follow one of two 1400- to 1600-calorie diets: either a very-low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, or a low-fat, high-carb diet. In the low-carb diet, 4 percent of total calories came from carbohydrates, 35 percent from protein, and 61 percent from fat (20 percent of that from saturated fat). In the low-fat diet, 46 percent of total calories came from carbs, 24 percent from protein, and 30 percent from fat (with instructions to consume less than 20 grams a day of saturated fat). Then the researchers assessed the subjects' body weight as well as their psychological well-being over one year.

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At the end of one year, both groups had lost about the same amount of weight (about 30 pounds), but only those eating the low-fat diet continued to feel good about it—or about anything. Despite similar and substantial weight losses in the low-carbohydrate group, the mood state of that group improved initially but then returned to its previously low level. "This suggests that some aspects of the low-carb diet may have had detrimental effects on mood that, over the course of one year, negated any positive effects of weight loss,” the researchers wrote.