The ones who were counseled to follow a lower-fat eating pattern with more vegetables, fruits and grains lost some weight at first -- about 5 pounds -- and their weight all through the seven years was less than the women who didn't follow this pattern.

Increasing carbohydrates as we did it, with an emphasis on vegetables and fruits and grains, in fact, does not promote weight gain.

We realized that it also provided a wonderful opportunity to examine the impact of a low-fat eating pattern on weight.

We wanted to see if women who had hysterectomies differed in some way from those who did not, and whether the hysterectomy itself had an influence on heart disease.

We cannot rule out some small residual influence of the surgery itself on cardiovascular events. But it looks as if women with hysterectomies have more heart disease because women who get hysterectomies also have more risk factors.

The take-home message is that lower-fat diets don't cause weight gain, and for weight maintenance this is a reasonable diet for people to follow. If we could just get people to maintain their weight, we'd be halfway there on this nation's obesity epidemic.