After a long battle between nutritionists over what diet is better for you, science chimes in with information that can help you decide.

Over the decades, each new academic study has swayed the public one way, and then another. A low-fat diet was the fad of the 80’s and 90’s and more recently a low-carb diet is the way to go, according to The Washington Post.

An even more intense suggestion and following of the “right” diet is gluten-free, paleo, vegan and more. But in order to attempt to settle the debate, scientists from the National Institute of Health set up an extremely organized, detailed, and unusual, experiment.

They checked in 19 equally obese adults with the same weight and body-mass into an inpatient unit at NIH clinical center, by their approved consent, for two-week increments.

The first five days of every visit, the participants all received a baseline died of 2,740 calories that consisted of 50 percent carbs, 35 percent fat and 15 percent protein. Following their introduction to the study, for six days they were either given a low-fat diet or low-carb diet with a total daily calorie intake 30 percent less than what they began with.

In addition to the food restrictions, the volunteers each exercised for one hour a day on a treadmill.

The next five days found the volunteers in metabolic chambers: sealed, climate-controlled rooms where they were hooked up to a battery of recording and analyzing devices.

After observing and analyzing the data including how much carbon dioxide and nitrogen they were releasing to their hormone and metabolite levels, scientists were able to make a conclusion.

The researchers concluded that calorie-per-calorie, low-fat diets beat out low-carb diets.

Overall, the participants didn’t lose much in the short period. But calculated out, the researchers projected that over six months, the low-fat group would end up losing six more pounds on average than the low-carb group.

“In contrast to previous claims about a metabolic advantage of carbohydrate restriction for enhancing body fat loss our data and model simulations support the opposite conclusion,” Kevin D. Hall, a senior investigator at NIH in biological modeling, and his co-authors said.

So the question is: should you switch to a low-fat diet if you’re on a low-carb diet now? The answer is no. Scientists and researchers confirm that you should stick to whatever diet you are on now if it works for you and keeps you in good health. It’s more about committing to healthy eating than removing components of your diet altogether.

The researchers stated that “translation of our results to real-world weight-loss diets for treatment of obesity is limited.” The design of their experiment relies on strict control of food intake — which “is unrealistic in free-living individuals,” they said.

David L. Katz, founder of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, added in that even though this study shows a possible higher weight loos for low-fat diets, scientistis overall still believe that fats are not as bad as people once thought.

“In my view, this is a reality check,” Katz told Forbes. “It does not invite us to go back to preferential fat-cutting, but it does invite us to get past the new folly of preferential carb-cutting. My hope is this study provides a nudge not from one nutrient fixation to another, but in that direction: Food, not nutrients.”