Lose 11% Body Fat in 8 Weeks W/Out Dieting Efforts!? The 'Egg-Approach' to Low CHO Dieting Quintuples Fat Loss

There are 1bn ways to prepare your eggs and the Internet is a rich source of recipes.

You will probably remember the SuppVersity news about the pro-anabolic effects of eggs - whole eggs - from the other day. Now, "gainz" are nice, but as a recent study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham indicates (Goss 2017), they are also a highly useful diet food.

In their recent experimental trial, Amy Miskimon Goss and colleagues investigated the effects of whole eggs, being consumed as part of a low carb diet on the diet-induced changes in body composition, body fat distribution and selected health parameters in aging men and women.
For their randomized clinical trial, Goss et al. recruited 26 men and women aged between  60 and 75yrs. All subjects had a baseline BMI within the "obese" category (30–40kg/m²) and were randomly allocated to consume either ...

• an egg-based lower-CHO/high-fat diet (EBD) containing less than <25% of the energy from carbohydrates, more than 50% from fat and 25% of the energy from protein, or
• a standard CHO-based/low-fat diet (STD) with equal amounts of protein (25%), but 55% of the energy from carbohydrates and only 20% from fat

for 8 weeks. Interestingly enough, participants were not asked to restrict total energy intake. What they had to do, though was to eat the eggs or breakfast bars, the subjects in the EBD and STD group were provided with, respectively.

Figure 1: Overview of the macronutrient composition of the diets (Goss 2017).

The subject's body composition was measured by DXA, their resting energy expenditure (REE) by indirect calorimetry, and insulin, glucose, HOMA-IR and lipids by analyzing the blood of the subjects after an overnight fast, at baseline and after the 8-week intervention.
As you can see in Figure 1 (and probably already expected in view of the 'ad-libitum' approach), the subjects on the egg-based low carb diet lost more body fat (11.0% vs. 2.3% total fat | p<0.01 for the difference between diets).  Healthwise of even greater importance is that the EBD group also experienced ~3-fold greater loss in unhealthy visceral adipose tissue (aka 'organ fat') compared to the STD group (−23.3% vs −7.1%, p<0.01 for the difference between diets).

Figure 2: Relative changes in total and visceral body fat as measured by DXA scans performed before and after an 8-week high-fat, low-carb (blue) vs. low-fat, high-carb (orange) intervention W/ dietary restriction (Goss 2017).

Against that background, it's at best mildly surprising that the egg+low-carb diet also yielded significantly greater decrease in HOMA-IR (p<0.01); and that only the egg+low-carb group recorded significant decreases in triglycerides and increase in HDL. The changes in lean mass and the subjects' resting energy expenditure did not change.

And there's more new egg research... well, sort of "egg"

That adding eggs can do the most if you use them to replace refined starches and added sugar is also supported by another ahead-of-print paper. The 3-week cross-over (2-wk washout) study one comes from the Midwest Biomedical Research/Center for Metabolic and Cardiovascular Health Objective and evaluated the effects of a substituting refined starches and added sugars (16% of the total energy intake per day) with a combination of egg protein (Epro; 8% total energy intake) and unsaturated fatty acids (UFAs; 8% total energy intake) - which is basically a lower SFA version of eggs from free-ranging hens - on insulin sensitivity (primary outcome) and other cardiometabolic health markers in overweight or obese adults with elevated triglyceride (TG) concentrations.As you can see in Figure 3, the twenty-five participants' [11 men, 14 women; mean ± SEM: age, 46.3 ± 2.4 y; body mass index (in kg/m²), 31.8 ± 1.0] Matsuda insulin sensitivity index (MISI) increased 18.1% ± 8.7% from baseline during the Epro and UFA condition and decreased 5.7% ± 6.2% from baseline during the carbohydrate condition (P < 0.001). Similarly, the disposition index (tests the function of the pancreas) increased 23.8% ± 20.8% during the Epro and UFA condition compared with a decrease of 16.3% ± 18.8% during carbohydrate (P = 0.042).

Figure 3: Changes in glucose metabolism and blood lipids (as marker of heart health) in recent crossover study of the effects of replacing refined carbohydrates (16% total energy) with egg-wite + PUFA (Maki 2017).

Of greater importance for heart vs. metabolic health was the incrase in LDL peak particle size of 0.12 nm with Epro and UFA that stood in contrast to a further worsening in form of a decrease of 0.15 nm with carbohydrates (P = 0.019). Similarly, TG and VLDL cholesterol concentrations were lowered by 18.5% (−35.7%, −6.9%) and 18.6% (−34.8%, −7.4%), respectively, after the Epro and UFA condition and by 2.5% (−13.4%, 17.0%) and 3.6% (−12.5%, 16.2%), respectively, after the carbohydrate diet condition (P < 0.002).
References:

• Goss, Amy Miskimon, et al. "Effects of an Egg-based, Carbohydrate-restricted Diet on Body Composition, Fat Distribution, and Metabolic Health in Older Adults with Obesity: Preliminary results from a randomized controlled trial." The FASEB Journal 31.1 Supplement (2017): lb320-lb320.
• Hall, K. D. "A review of the carbohydrate–insulin model of obesity." European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2017).
• Maki, Kevin C. et al. "Replacement of Refined Starches and Added Sugars with Egg Protein and Unsaturated Fats Increases Insulin Sensitivity and Lowers Triglycerides in Overweight or Obese Adults with Elevated Triglycerides." The Journal of Nutrition (2017) First published May 17, 2017, doi: 10.3945/ jn.117.248641
• Noakes, Timothy David, and Johann Windt. "Evidence that supports the prescription of low-carbohydrate high-fat diets: a narrative review." British Journal of Sports Medicine 51.2 (2017): 133-139.