Is a Low Carb Diet Best for Burning Liver Fat?

I ran into a horde of regurgitated news release type articles the other day that pointed me towards a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this month. It was a short-term study – just two weeks long – but it clearly showed how a low-carb diet burns more liver fat during Atkins Induction than a low-calorie diet does.

I didn’t read all of those articles, because the first two were just copies of the original press release put out by UT Southwestern Medical Center – the sponsor of the study. So I took a trip over to PubMed where I actually found two studies published this month comparing how low-calorie diets and low-carb diets affect fatty liver disease.

What is a Fatty Liver?

Even though the researchers of the two-week study say fat in the liver “is due, in part, to increased hepatic synthesis of fat from carbohydrates via lipogensis,” The American Liver Foundation says a little bit of fat in the liver is normal. Maybe that’s because so many Americans obey current recommendations to eat lots of whole grains and complex carbs; so for them, liver fat would be expected.

However, the liver foundation does say that if you have more than 5 to 10 percent of fat in your liver by weight, that it moves up a notch and receives the classification of non-alcoholic liver disease (steatosis). For many folks, that’s all it is, though – just a fatty liver. No symptoms (other than possibly being overweight or obese), and no liver troubles.

But for some, the fat shoved into the cells inflames the liver. For them, the diagnosis upgrades to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). This type of fatty liver can create scarring which plugs up the cells and damages the liver. NASH ranges from mildly inflammatory to severe cirrhosis and even liver failure; so it’s not something you want to fool around with.

Comparing a Low-Calorie Diet to Low-Carbohydrate Diets

In the two-week study, JD Browning actually put his subjects on a true, low-carb diet. We don’t actually see that very often, so it makes the results highly valid. The participants got less than 20 grams of carbohydrate a day. While, the press release from Southwestern compared that amount to a small banana, most of us know that if you use mostly vegetables for your carb sources, the restriction still gives you plenty of food.

I don’t know if the researchers expected the results they got or not, because one of the reasons they stated for running the test was that carbohydrate restriction studies have received “little attention.” But in the conclusion, after seeing a significant difference in the way low-carb diets burn liver fat, they clearly stated that they didn’t know why. At first, I found that a bit amusing, but then I realized that perhaps for them, low-carb science is new.

In the six-month study, S. Haufe didn’t find a significant difference between the two diets. Both diets worked equally well to burn liver fat – which is why the two-week study is so significant; at least as far as the researchers are concerned. While cutting down on calories will eventually encourage the body to burn excess fat in the liver, if time is of the essence, a low-carb diet will improve fatty liver disease quicker.

But then, most of us already knew that, didn't we.