Low fat and low carbohydrate diets are both effective in helping obese adults lose weight over long terms. Cutting carbs, however, appears to help with some heart risk factors, including lowering diastolic blood pressure and boasting your HDL (good) cholesterol.
The study will appear in Annals of Internal Medicine. It does stress that any diet needs to be part of an overall lifestyle change to work effectively.
The research looked at 153 people who were assigned to a low-carb diet, and 154 to a low-fat diet. After two years, each group showed a 7% weight loss.