Benji Kurtz lost over 100 pounds in a year by eating a low-fat, plant-based diet.

Obesity Energetics: Body Weight Regulation And The Effects Of Diet Composition, Gastroenterology, Online 10 Feb 2017

Weight changes are accompanied by imbalances between calorie intake and expenditure. This fact is often misinterpreted to suggest that obesity is caused by gluttony and sloth and can be treated by simply advising people to eat less and move more. However, various components of energy balance are dynamically interrelated and weight loss is resisted by counterbalancing physiological processes.

While low carbohydrate diets have been suggested to partially subvert these processes by increasing energy expenditure and promoting fat loss, our meta-analysis of 32 controlled feeding studies with isocaloric substitution of carbohydrate for fat found that both energy expenditure and fat loss were greater with lower fat diets.

And:

These results are in the opposite direction to the predictions of the carbohydrate-insulin model.

The carbohydrate-insulin model predicts that the more carb we eat, the more insulin we secrete – and since insulin directs fat-storage, the more fat we will accumulate. This study found the opposite. It’s not carbs that make us fat, it’s fat that makes us fat.

By the way, the carbohydrate-insulin model does not take into account insulin resistance. If you eat carbs but don’t have much insulin resistance, those carbs will be cleared from the bloodstream without need to oversecrete insulin. You know what increases insulin resistance? The fat we eat, as I’ve written about ad nauseum.

The lead author, Kevin Hall PhD, lists as his conflicts of interest “funding from the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) to investigate the effects of ketogenic diets on human energy expenditure.” Ketogentic diets are low-carb diets. NuSI is Gary Taubes’ well-funded initiative that I wrote about here:

Gary Taubes Is A Low-Carb Advocate. His Multimillion-Dollar Start-Up, NuSI, Found Low-Carb Diets Don’t Work.

Recall that studies conducted by NuSI are “more rigorous than all of the nutrition research conducted to date,” and “most of the existing nutrition research amounts to junk science.” So, this study, conducted by a NuSI fund recipient, should be pretty telling. Right?