You want fries with that?

A surprising new study on diet is out from National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. It turns some dieting sacred cows out to pasture, the most sacred being that 3,500 calories = one pound, gained or lost. (This is pretty important as our children are already the fattest in the world. Something we should care about.)

The story in today’s NY Times is by Jane Brody, a health writer I’ve trusted for 30 years. The study confirms much of the usual dieting advice – most dieters regain the weight, permanent eating patterns have to change for weight to stay off and exercise combined with dieting yields the best most enduring results.

That said,  these two nuggets surprised me – one very scary and one very hopeful:

According to the researchers, it is easy to gain weight unwittingly from a very small imbalance in the number of calories consumed over calories used. Just 10 extra calories a day is all it takes to raise the body weight of the average person by 20 pounds in 30 years, the authors wrote.

A more realistic result, he said, is that cutting out 250 calories a day — the amount in a small bar or chocolate or half a cup of premium ice cream — would lead to a weight loss of about 25 pounds over three years, with half that loss occurring the first year.

Hmmmmm . . .