Ready for another diet attempt?

In the never-ending attempt to lose weight, I listened with interest this morning to the latest 'Health Report' on Radio National. Norman Swan interviewed an Israeli researcher on her 2 year study comparing the efficacy of 3 different weight-loss diets: low fat, Mediterranean and low carbohydrate. Each diet was calorie restricted, but not to an extreme measure and she managed to get something like 80% compliance over the 2 years. Findings: All diet groups lost weight. However, the low fat dieters lost the least, the low carb dieters lost the most and the Mediterranean dieters were in the middle. She also found that the low carb diet produced the best improvements in both blood triglycerides and blood sugar control and that even when the weight loss plateaued off, improvements in the triglycerides continued while the diet was maintained.

Which I guess makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. It's only recently in human evolution that we've had access to large amounts of carbohydrate-rich food. Since we domesticated grains and developed the modern strains of wheat, oats, maise, millet, rice, etc in fact. Not to mention the even more recent explosion in the availability of sugar! So I guess our bodies still runs best on the meat, leaves, tubers and fruits with occassional nuts and seeds diet we evolved on. As my brother muttered when we were discussing our sister's recent development of diabetes, the diet the doctors' recommended is just the basic healthy diet we all should be eating anyhow.