Is a Low Carb Diet Best for Burning Liver Fat?

How Do You Reverse a Fatty Liver?

I ran into a horde of regurgitated news articles the other day that pointed me toward a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this month (May 2011).

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.

But I did take 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. 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 moves the condition up a notch to 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. The scars plug up your 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.

Burning Liver Fat: Comparing Low-Calorie Diets 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 small amount of carbohydrate to one small banana, most of us know that if you use mostly vegetables for your carbohydrate sources, the restriction 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:

Carbohydrate restriction studies have received “little attention.”

In the conclusion, after seeing a significant difference in the way that low-carb diets burn liver fat, which is classified as visceral fat, they clearly stated:

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 low-calorie diets and low-carb diets work equally well to burn liver fat, which is why the two-week study is so significant, 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.