Good news for people who like oil more than bread: People on a low-carbohydrate diet lowered certain risk factors for cardiovascular disease and lost nearly three times as much weight as those on a low-fat diet, a new study found.

‘This isn’t a license to hit the butter and meat fats,” cautioned Dr. Lydia Bazzano, a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and one of the study’s lead authors. ‘But even very high-fat diets can be healthy.”

The yearlong study, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that total and ‘bad” (LDL) cholesterol levels – considered a primary risk factor for heart disease – went down equally for both groups, but ‘good cholesterol [HDL] went up quite a bit more on the low-carb diet than it did on the low-fat diet,” Bazzano said.

At the end of the study period, participants in the low-carb group had lost nearly 12 pounds on average. Those in the low-fat group had lost 4 pounds on average.

The people in the low-carb group were told to have less than 40 grams […]