Is this news? I was under the impression that it was fairly common knowledge that all calories aren't created equally.
To quote Gary Taubes, who tries to puncture this myth:
The reason people believe we get fat because of overeating and sedentary behavior is because they believe the laws of thermodynamics somehow dictate this to be true. In particular the first law, which tells us that energy is conserved, so if a system takes in more energy than it expends, the energy contained in the system has to increase. If that system happens to be our fat tissue, than the fat tissue accumulates fat. That’s the logic. So if we eat more than we expend, we get fatter and the logic turns this around to say that we get fat because we eat more than we expend. And so, overeating and sedentary behavior are the causes. This is the logic that leads virtually every government health agency and independent health organization (the AHA, the AMA, you name it) to have some variation of this World Health Organization statement on its website or in its promotional material: “The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbalance between calories consumed on one hand, and calories expended on the other hand.”
Calories have something to do with it because they are one part of the equation. Calories in does equal calories out. Calories In = Calories Stored + Calories Expended. But, the mistake is in thinking that the law of thermodynamics means that the type of calories in doesn't impact the ratio of calories stored/expended -- the variables are not independent. The content of the food you eat impacts: your hunger, your energy level, fat storage rates, and your metabolic rate, all of which mean that attempting to cut or add calories may not have the expected impact depending on what the food is.
The reason sometimes we put too much emphasis on the basic-thermodynamics side of things is that we're busy fighting a war against dumb fad diets.
But once you acknowledge the basic calories in vs calories out principle, you can start thinking about what foods make it easiest to maintain a caloric deficit. Even the most 'traditional' of health authorities acknowledge that this is a factor, which is why they won't say "Hey, whatever, eat three slices of chocolate cake a day and nothing else". The first factor is making sure you get sufficient nutrition along with your calories, the second is making sure you feel full while maintaining a caloric deficit. There's a growing acknowledgement that low-carb diets can help with both of these.
This study suggests a third factor: that eating a low-carb diet can actually boost your base metabolic rate. How? Not sure. It would be interesting to see whether it gets replicated in a larger scale study.
I believe low-carb diets (low carb, slow carb, paleo, etc) are well understood and praised amongst people with interest in nutrition and fitness, but it's still slowly making it's way into the general population.
For a good reason. First and foremost, general population just needs to eat less, a lot less. Once we get past that point, macro-nutrient composition can be the next level of diet optimization.
I don't know if this is a property of high-fat versus high-carb diets, but either way it's a mistake to think in absolute terms.
I also disagree that we have a weight problem because "we eat too much". I lost more than 40 pounds by cutting all the sugars from my diet, while still eating plenty of food.
I tried it myself and it didn't work. The mental pressure, the guilt when you go wrong, the bad moods you have when you can't satisfy some urge - all of these are culminating with depression, until finally you give up because being overweight suddenly doesn't seem so bad.
Besides I've seen some statistics with the growth of the average caloric intake in the past couple of decades, compared with the growth of sugar intake and the growth of sugar in our daily diet has a much, much better correlation with the rise of obesity and diabetes.
People should be encouraged to stop eating crap that they don't even like and start eating good and healthy food.
Besides, the body takes about 20 minutes to send the first "I am full" signal anyway. I can go through the majority of a large pizza within that time with my "normal" eating pace.