Thin doctor's specialty is dieting

DURHAM -- Will Yancy, a slight man with a trim waistline, might, on first glance, come across as someone who would have very little expertise on the ups and downs of the latest diets.

But the Durham doctor has recently emerged as a leading judge in the raging debate between low-carb diets versus low-fat regimens.

Yancy's verdict: Go low carb.

In late January, the Archives of Internal Medicine published his yearlong study of 146 overweight or obese people with a range of health problems. The participants, patients from Durham VA Medical Center clinics, were divided into two diet groups. One group limited its intake of carbohydrates. The other took a prescribed weight-loss medication and cut down on fats and calories.

"So what we found," Yancy said, "was that both diets were equally effective in terms of weight loss."

But low-carb diets, such as Atkins, were better at lowering blood pressure among the participants than weight-loss pills.

"The message I like to pass along is diets can work for weight loss," Yancy said, adding that the regimens work only if people stay on them. "What we're lacking, and the focus of my next research, is how to get people to stick to them."

Yancy, 40, has been interested in obesity research since he was fresh out of the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. While working in University of Pittsburgh clinics, two things baffled him.

"One was that people came into my clinic and wanted sleeping pills, and as someone who had no trouble sleeping, I never understood this," Yancy said.

The other enigma, Yancy said, was that many of the clinic patients had medical problems and illnesses that were directly linked to weight problems. What Yancy could not understand at the time, he said, was why patients who struggled with diabetes or high blood pressure did not just lose weight.

A decade later, the sleep question remains a curiosity, but he's devoted his life's work to figuring out the best way for people to lose weight.

His peers and colleagues have taken note. In addition to getting articles published in medical journals, Yancy was honored three years ago with the President's Early Career Award for Scientists.

"One of the things that really made his early success is that there is a lot of 'fad-ism' in diets," said Dr. Eugene Z.Oddone, a Duke University professor of medicine and director of the Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care at the Durham VA Medical Center. "He really is one of the first ones that kind of submitted these diets to rigorous studies."

Formative years

Yancy was born in California but grew up in Durham.

Both parents worked in the medical field. His father was a pediatrician, in private practice first, then at Duke. His mother was a nurse in obstetrics and gynecology.

After finishing at Jordan High School in the late 1980s, Yancy did not stray far from home for college. He got an undergraduate degree at Duke University and, in a math class, met the woman who would become his wife.

Medical school and post-graduate training took Yancy to Greenville and then Pittsburgh.

But Yancy felt a pull back to Durham.

"It has a lot of unique features," Yancy said. "It doesn't feel like it's a big metropolis, but it has a major university that brings a diversity of people to it, but it still feels like living in the South, down home."

With a busy work schedule and three children, Yancy spends much of his free time with family. In the heart of ACC basketball country, he finds time, of course, to cheer on his favorite college hoops team - the Blue Devils.

He lends his time and expertise on energy balance to the N.C. Association for Biomedical Research high school teaching program, which offers science and medical workshops for teachers interested in providing students with a richer education.

On most Mondays, Yancy plays basketball with friends.

Though he tries to exercise several more times a week and enjoys water-skiing on Lake Gaston, Yancy attributes his trim waistline to healthy eating.

"I don't snack; I don't drink my calories," Yancy says.

Corrine Voils, a social psychologist and health service research who works with Yancy, says her colleague has a fondness for sweets.

"What's funny is we eat lunch together a lot and a lot of the low-carb researchers, they won't eat carbs," Voils says. "Will's not that way. He loves chocolate chip cookies. He loves dessert. He'll give up french fries and rice or other carbs so he can have his cookies."

Gentle teasing aside, Voils says, she admires how committed Yancy is to his patients.

"He's an innovative thinker," Voils says. "I think he really cares about patients and finding out about ways to help them lose weight."

Now, though, after years of obesity research, Yancy says he knows that combatinghypertension and some forms of diabetes is not as simple as instructing someone to lose weight, as he thought early in his career.

"What we're lacking, and what I want to focus on next, is how to get people to stick to their diets," Yancy said. "Whether that's tailoring a diet to an individual or tailoring it to their metabolic syndrome, that's what we need to learn more about."