Carb Fasting Fantasy Study?

Happy hump day, Nerd Herd! There's been a request at The Real Fitness Nerd HQ to have a looky-loo at a diet comparison presented this month at the CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium:

(British researcher Michelle Harvie and colleagues put) one third of the women on a Mediterranean-type diet that restricted calories to about 1,500 per day. A second group was told to eat normally most of the time, but two days a week to cut carbs and also calories to about 650 on those two days. The third group was also to cut carbs two days a week, but there was no calorie restriction on those days. 

At the end of four weeks women in both of the intermittent dieting groups had lost more weight — about 9 pounds — than the women who ate low calorie meals every day of the week — about 5 pounds.

It's also worth noting that the intermittent fasters experienced greater drops in insulin resistance.

So that's great and all, but I have a few issues. First off, I'm annoyed that they compared a super-high calorie deficit with the carb-fasting without throwing a sensible diet with a slight deficit in the mix. From an insulin resistance perspective, I'd be much more interested in seeing those numbers, given intermittent fasting may be a good long-term solution for diabetes management, whereas committing to a lifetime of 1500 daily calories tends to involve such pesky side-effects as breaking down of muscles for fuel, reduced metabolism, reenforcement of eating disorders and, oh yes, death. With that in mind, it nulls the comparison a little.

Furthermore, there seems to me to be a lot of vague "eat what you want" aspects to this study, making for a lot of confounding variables, n'est pas?

But even more furthermore, I question the timeline - 4 weeks doesn't prove anything. I've read a few studies showing that low-carbing works better at the start of a diet, but not necessarily in the long term. Oddly enough, in my research to document this, I came across a study by - you're not going to believe this - the same crew who presented the research we're discussing here! Whadayaknow, Joe!

In May of 2011, Harvie et al authored a study in the International Journal of Obesity in which they compared "intermittent continuous energy (IER) with continuous energy restriction (CER) for weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other metabolic disease risk markers." This study, however, spanned 6 months. The IER ladies lost slightly more weight (1.7 pounds more, on average). The general findings were that "IER is as effective as CER with regard to weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other health biomarkers."

In other words, IER was a slightly better method, but not enough to get too thrilled about. So who's zooming whom here? Are these the same study? Were I a Conspiracy Nerd, I'd think someone cherry picked data from the May study to make for a more titillating, headline-grabbing December presentation. Who knows? I suppose the truth is out there.

I'm warming to intermittent fasting more and more each day. I'm willing to accept new methods for weight loss and diabetes prevention, but something's gone afoul here.