According to scientists, people who want to keep their weight down, should switch to a vegetarian diet.
Scientists, who examined the eating habits of 22,000 people over five year period, both meat consumers and vegetarians, discovered they all gained a few kilos but meat consumers who switched to a vegetarian or vegan diet gained the least.
"Contrary to current popular views that a diet low in carbohydrates and high in protein keeps weight down, we found that the lowest weight gain came in people with high intake of carbohydrates and low intake of protein," noted Professor Tim Key.
The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, compared weight gain among meat consumers, fish consumers, vegetarians and vegans - people who exclude every kind of animal products from their diet.
The result was that people gained 2 kilos (4.4 lb) on average during five year period. None of them was overweight.
"The weight gain was less in the vegans than in the meat-eaters and somewhere in between in the other groups," said professor Key, a scientist from Britain’s Cancer Research UK charity and the University of Oxford, who conducted the research.
The lowest weight gain was reported in people who changed their diet to consume less animal products, the professor told Reuters.
According to Key and other experts, exercise was another meaningful factor in weight control.
"The data also showed that people who became more physically active during the five-year period gained less weight than people who did very little exercise," Key noted.
The findings come from the British arm of European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), which is collating the eating habits of 500,000 people from 10 countries to find out how diet is related to cancer.
The EPIC research has already found that people with diabetes have three times the normal risk of colorectal cancer, which results in death of more than 490,000 people worldwide every year.
The research also stated that diet is second only to tobacco, as a major cause of cancer. Our eating habits, along with alcohol, are responsible for almost a third of cancer cases in developed countries.
