BEIJING, Jan. 6 (Xinhuanet) -- A latest study shows that picking one kind of diet and sticking to it may be the best way to lose weight.   

United States researchers have found that four fashionable diets - including the Atkins low carb eating regime and the Ornish vegetarian diet - have only limited success in reducing weight.

    According to the reports of the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama), a team from the Tufts-New England Medical Centre in Boston recommended that weight loss depended more on sticking with a diet than the type of diet.

    Dr. Michael L. Dansinger, of Tufts-New England Medical Center, and his colleagues assigned 160 dieters -- aged 22 to 72, and all with cardiac risk factors such as high blood pressure and blood cholesterol levels -- to either the Atkins, Weight Watchers, Zone or the Ornish diets. They followed the dieters for up to a year to evaluate weight loss and reduction of heart disease risk factors.

    Average weight loss at one year was 4.6 pounds for Atkins (which minimizes carbohydrate intake but does not restrict fat), 6.6 pounds for Weight Watchers (which emphasizes portion control and calories), 7.1 pounds for Zone (which suggests a caloric ratio of 40-30-30 for carbohydrates, proteins and fats) and 7.3 pounds for Ornish (which restricts fat).

    "All four diets resulted in modest statistically significant weight loss at one year, with no statistically significant differences between diets," said the researchers, who were led by Michael Dansinger at Tufts.

    All of those in the test had problems with hyper-tension, high cholesterol or diabetes.

    "In each diet group, approximately 25 percent of the initial participants sustained a one-year weight loss of more than five percent of initial body weight and approximately 10 percent of participants lost more than 10 percent of body weight," Dansinger and the other authors wrote.

    "We found that a variety of popular diets can reduce weight and several cardiac risk factors under realistic clinical conditions, but only for the minority of individuals who can sustain a high dietary adherence level."

    They said that none of the diets produced "satisfactory adherence rates". Enditem

    (Agencies)