Research

Energy balance

Weight loss achieved via a very-low-carbohydrate, high-saturated-fat diet does not impair endothelial function (measured by flow-mediated dilatation) and improves other cardiovascular risk markers, refuting the hypothesis that such diets inherently damage vascular health.

If you are overweight and have abdominal obesity, losing weight through a very-low-carbohydrate, high-saturated-fat diet does not appear to harm your blood vessel health (endothelial function) over an 8-week period. In fact, other markers of inflammation and clotting risk improved. The key factor seems to be the weight loss itself, which may counteract the negative effects of high saturated fat intake seen in people who don't lose weight.

GoodRefutesHIGH confidence
An LC does not impair FMD. We observed beneficial effects of both diets on most of the CVD risk factors measured.
Masato Kajikawa et al. · Biomedicines · 2022

Why this rating

Randomized controlled trial with 99 participants, parallel design, and objective vascular measurements, though limited to 8 weeks.

Source

Obesity and Endothelial Function

Masato Kajikawa et al. · Biomedicines · 2022

DOI 10.3390/biomedicines10071745

rct · n=99Cited 81×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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