Research

Hormonal

A Very Low Carbohydrate Diet improves insulin sensitivity and favorable lipid profiles (increased HDL, decreased triglycerides) in older adults with obesity compared to a low-fat diet.

Beyond just weight loss, switching to a very low-carbohydrate diet can significantly improve your blood markers for heart health, specifically by lowering triglycerides and raising HDL cholesterol, more so than a standard low-fat diet would.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
The VLCD had greater increases in insulin sensitivity and HDL-C and decreases in fasting insulin and triglycerides compared to the LFD group.
Amy M. Goss et al. · Nutrition & Metabolism · 2020

Why this rating

Randomized clinical trial with gold-standard clamp measurements, though sample size is small.

Source

Effects of weight loss during a very low carbohydrate diet on specific adipose tissue depots and insulin sensitivity in older adults with obesity: a randomized clinical trial

Amy M. Goss et al. · Nutrition & Metabolism · 2020

DOI 10.1186/s12986-020-00481-9

rct · n=34Cited 95×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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