Statistical analyses The investigators used descriptive statistics for summarizing the baseline clinical characteristics of patients and analysis of variance for examining the differences in these characteristics among all groups. Patients who continued the intervention for at least 4 weeks were included in the analyses. The investigators adopted the last observation carried forward (LOCF) approach for replacing missing data, assuming no change in the missing values of metabolic indices after an event of dropout. Furthermore, for investigating whether repeated measures collected in a longitudinal manner change over time, the investigators first used the paired t test for examining differences between the baseline and follow-up measures. Repeated measure analyses were conducted using 2-way within-subjects analysis of variance for examining group (df = 2, between groups), time (df = 3, within subjects), and interaction (df = 6, interaction between time and groups) effects on the changes in metabolic profiles over time. The analyses were conducted using SPSS Version 20.0 (IBM, Armonk, NY). P < 0.05 was considered to indicate statistical significance.