Calories, Not Protein Affect Weight Gain

 Losing weight and eating better are usually high on the list of most people who make  New Year's resolutions. One theory holds that you can overeat and not gain weight, as long as the extra food is protein.  A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at whether that's true. 

That study looked at how eating different levels of protein affected weight gain in people who ate more calories than they needed to keep their weight stable.  It included  25 men and women aged 18 to 35  who were at a normal weight or slightly overweight.  They ate low, normal or high protein diets for eight weeks. They  were also overfed by almost a thousand calories daily.

According to study leader George A. Bray, M.D., of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center "Fat storage was exactly the same with all three levels of protein. That is, it was the calories that they ate that affected the body fat that they stored."

And he added,  "the key finding of this study is that calories are more important than protein while consuming excess amounts of energy with respect to increases in body fat."

Researchers say participants eating the low protein diet gained a little less than half the weight of those on the normal and high protein diets.