This Diet Reduced the Most Liver Fat in New Study
A new study addresses a longstanding challenge in diet and nutrition research: participants sticking to the diet. When study participants get home, their adherence to the given diet for the experiment can often wane, as can a perfect memory when self-reporting their food diary.
It turns out that when a team of researchers supplied the meals for three different diets and dietitians provided weekly coaching, participants' capacity to stick to the diet program worked in transformative ways. Here's which diet was most helpful for the participants' liver health.
Study method
The study started with 55 participants, but only 42 made it all the way through. They were split into three groups of 14. Each group was assigned one of three diets: low-carb ketogenic, Mediterranean, or a plant-based and very low-fat diet.
Then came the prepared meals. In the study, published in August 2026 in Cell Metabolism , a team of endocrinology and nutrition scientists at Washington University's School of Medicine in St. Louis, as well as University of California, Berkeley, say for each group, "all food was provided as packed-out meals and participants met weekly with the study dietitian to support adherence to the assigned diet."
Participants ranged in age between 35 and 50, and around two-thirds were women while the remaining one-third were men. At the outset, these individuals had a body mass index falling within the obesity category. They were also prediabetic and had been diagnosed with fatty liver disease . All groups lost around 10% of their total body weight through the diets.
The results
StudyFinds explains that remarkably, advanced MRI imaging showed those on the ketogenic diet experienced an average reduction of two-thirds of their liver fat—twice as much as the people on the other two diets.
When that imaging was combined with blood tests measuring blood glucose, triglycerides, and other values, the researchers found: "Weight loss increased the hepatic insulin sensitivity index in all groups, but the increase was two-to-three-fold greater in the very-low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet group." In other words, the ketogenic diet seemed to contribute the most significantly to insulin sensitivity in the liver, which is a desirable trend in reducing diabetes risk.
The researchers say all three diets helped insulin sensitivity in the muscles, which is another improvement. But the ketogenic diet also helped improve blood sugar, as well as triglyceride levels in the liver.
In their summary, the researchers conclude that the keto diet's effects on variables like liver function create an impressive improvements in health: "These results demonstrate that a very-low-carbohydrate diet has greater cardiometabolic benefits, particularly in hepatic [liver] metabolic function, than matched 10% weight loss induced by a Mediterranean or very-low-fat diet in people with metabolically unhealthy obesity."
All this said, choosing the most promising diet could come down to your health goals based on insight from your doctor.
For daily wellness updates, subscribe to The Healthy newsletter and follow The Healthy on Facebook , Instagram , and Google . Keep reading:
