The study conducted at the Nuclear Research Center required significant cooperation between staff, participants and their spouses. Workplace cafeteria managers worked with clinicians and nutritional advisers to transform the food service program and provide healthy food according to each of the low fat, low carb and Mediterranean diet regimens. Along with workplace nutritional counseling, trial participant spouses were educated on keeping to the diet strategy at home.

"Lifestyle projects in the workplace might be a perfect platform for long-term successful interventions. As low-fat, low-carbohydrate and Mediterranean diets all induced regression of carotid atherosclerosis, a low-carbohydrate diet seems like a safe and efficient alternative to low-fat and Mediterranean diets in reversing the atherosclerosis process," according to Dr. Dan Schwarzfuchs, the director of the medical clinic of the Nuclear Research Center where the intervention was conducted.

This study is part of the Dietary Intervention Randomized Control Trial (DIRECT), the initial results of which were previously published in the New England Journal of Medicine (July 2008). In this influential paper, it was found that Mediterranean and low-carbohydrate diets may be effective alternatives to low-fat diets for inducing weight loss, with more favorable effects on lipids obtained with the low-carbohydrate diet, and on glycemic control with the Mediterranean diet. Adherence to the study was 95 percent after the first year and 85 percent after the second, an unprecedented result in dietary intervention trials.

In the current study, the researchers sought to assess whether these diets had measurable effects on established (IMT) and emerging (3-Dimentional Vessel Wall Volume) ultrasound measurements of carotid atherosclerosis and whether such effects could be predicted by alterations in lipoproteins and other less-routinely measured cardiovascular biomarkers, which they did.

Source: American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev