WFPB Lifestyle and Muscle Mass Preservation

Body fat (BF) and muscle mass showed opposing association with mortality. Whole-food, plant-based (WFPB) lifestyle programs has been on the rise lately especially due to impressive health benefits. The results of research on the effectiveness of popular weight loss diets in obese subjects showed 20 to 30% loss of lean muscle mass within to the total body weight loss, whereas in the whole-food, plant-based (vegan) diet the loss was up to 42%. Therefore, an open research problem is to find a way how to improve body composition in an effective and healthy way (i.e., losing of excess BF while maintaining muscle mass as much as possible) but still using stric plant-based (vegan) diet. Investigators will perform retrospective analysis of measurements of body composition and phase angle values of aprox. 200 participants who were on a WFPB lifestyle program from 2016 to 2021 and performed two successive measurements (initial and follow up (FU)), without body mass index (BMI) limitation on same medically approved and calibrated bioelectrical impedance (Tanita 780 S MA, Tokyo, Japan) and were not yet included in our previous studies. A WFPB lifestyle program were consisted of nutrition (i), (ii) physical activity and (iii) support system. Primary outcome include the following measures: BF % and FFM and to examine the change from initial values to FU values (by gender), according BMI classification (e.g,, normal, pre-obese and obese) with subanalysis for those participants who lost up to 5 kg/more and those who lost 5 kg or more of body weight.