Which Plant Based Diet Produce the Best Weight Loss and Metabolic Outcomes?

TLDR:

• Plant based diets offer significant health benefits: they are high in fiber, nutrients, and low in calories. As such, they can be great choices for weight loss and metabolic health.
• A variety of plant-based diets exists, so researchers decided to explore which of these diets offer the best outcomes. Learn the details in our video blog post and sign up today!

If you like what you see here, check out our board-approved continuing education courses for PTs. We cover topics like:

- Nutrition interventions for chronic diseases (e.g., obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases)

- Advanced nutritional strategies to support physical therapy for patients with metabolic disorders

- Case studies demonstrating successful integration of nutrition into physical therapy care plans

Each physical therapy ceu course emphasizes practical, evidence-based learning, ensuring that participants can immediately apply the skills to their clinical practice. Sign up today and save:

Transcript:

Y'all, Dr. Wells here from nutritionalphysicaltherapy.com. I'm here in St. Augustine Beach. It's kind of a cool, cloudy, windy day, so it's hard to hear me. I'm sorry.

I got a cool research update today. This one published 17 November. I'm gonna do my best with the author's name.

It's Vyshnishka et al. This is probably easier to find by the study's name. It's called the VEGPREV study, which would be short for Vegetable Prevention Study.

Basically, it was a randomized controlled trial looking at four plant-based diets. The primary outcomes they were looking at were weight loss. Secondary outcomes they were looking at were body composition, waist circumference, glucose and insulin, blood pressure, and appetite.

They were looking at other metabolic factors, but for the long and short of it, those are the primary and secondary outcomes. The four diets they were looking at were a vegan diet. They were looking at the Mediterranean diet, also the Eat Lancet Planetary Diet, and a Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian Diet.

So their kind of standardized control diet was the World Health Organization's diet. So it's kind of just a general recommendation for overall health and wellness. Overall, the sample size in this study was about 85.

So if you break it out, about a little less than 20 per arm. Kind of low, but better than nothing, I guess. And what they saw is that within all the plant-based diets, they had significant reductions in weight loss, waist circumference, fat mass, significant reductions in energy, all really good things.

And that's what we would wanna see and probably expect to see in a predominantly plant-forward diet, right? As you add in more fruits and vegetables, people are more hungry. Eating more fruits and vegetables gives you more nutrient density, so you're also less hungry. And you also are putting in foods that are more nutrient-dense and less calorie-dense, right? So less ultra-processed foods.

Well, the interesting thing was the vegan diet and the eat diet saw the most weight loss reduction. So the vegan diet saw 6.7% reduction, while the eat saw 5.6% reduction. Overall, across the board, fat mass dropped in all the arms.

So all this to be said, that all forms of plant-based diets seem to confer significant health benefits across the board, including a Mediterranean diet, which I typically recommend for most of my patients because it is the easiest to shift from in terms of going from a Western diet, obviously getting someone to shift and oscillate all the way to a vegan diet can sometimes be very challenging. So I try to encourage patients to explore and look at a Mediterranean diet. It's got some of the most robust evidence around it, and it's easier to shift their dietary patterns that way.

So, anyhow, it's a great study. More of you physical therapists should check it out and check out our other stuff at nutritionalphysicaltherapy.com. We've got three great board-approved courses, and we're constantly updating. We're adding new lecture content, and soon we'll be rolling out a lifestyle medicine course with Dr. Religioso, also known as the manual therapist.

So be on the lookout for that. See you guys soon.