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February 08, 2006
Facts on Fats?
I hate to unleash an old Reaganism on all of you, but when it comes to medical studies, facts tend to be stupid things. Take the current one splashed across all headlines: low-fat diets don't protect woman against cancer or heart disease. Kind of a bummer to find out gnawing all those Snackwell's did you no good, and you might as well have been downing Oreos instead. Except it's not necessarily so. A few caveats:
• The Diets Weren't Low-Fat, or at least not by much. The normal American diet is 35% fat, by the end of the study, the average woman in the study was consuming 29% of her calories in fat.
• The Results Apply to Older Women, as the average age was 62. It's possible various dietary habits have different, stronger, or unexpected affects if begun earlier.
• We Already Knew This. Absolute quantity of fats aren't the issue, types are. That's where all the Mediterranean Diet hype comes from. Awhile back, the AHA (if memory serves) put one group of patients with advanced heart disease on their diet and another on the Mediterranean Diet -- they eventually called off the study, as those on the AHA's plan were dying too quickly. If you're consuming 30% of your calories in the form of trans- or saturated fats, you're not gonna do too well. If you're consuming 40% in the guise of olive oil (mono- and polyunsaturated fats) and salmon (omega 3s), however, you're in good shape. How a diet that's both low-fat and centered on good fats would fare remains unclear.
• 2/3rds of medical studies have their results subsequently overturned. Think about that for a minute.
February 8, 2006 | Permalink
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Comments
2/3rds of medical studies have their results subsequently overturned
Yeah, I know many people who are 'fed up' with the pendulum swings - especially on food issues.
Is vitamin E supplementation a good idea? Fats/Oils are bollocked up, as is mentioned. Is butter really evil? The public has been drowned in studies that seem to establish truth, but it turns out to be truthiness.
It would be great if there was some solution to this back-and-forth science that ends up confusing the public more than informing it. But I can't see a solution. Surely less research isn't the answer.
When Science and Nature magazines can get fooled by faked research on cloning, is there any wonder the average person tunes out, and even disregards the advice of their MD - the MDs cannot keep up anymore either.
The worse part of this confusion is that real science facts get lost in the dust, and opens the way for politicians and administrators of federal agencies like BushCo's to dispute what they choose to under the cover of 'disagreements' in the science community.
Posted by: JimPortandOR | Feb 8, 2006 12:19:39 PM
I don't see a see-saw on food research, I see a public that insists on manichean dualism. When it comes to foods, too much and too little are always bad things, so the Manichees looking for the magic bullet will always and everywhere be disappointed.
The headline study here, as Ezra notes, is something we already knew. Nobody should worry about 35% fat intake if it isn't all bacon, cheese and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Sure, sometimes we learn something new, like the fact that due to its geometry palm oil behaves more like a monounsaturated fat, despite being a saturated fatty acid. Like the lesson that, yes, trans fats are bad because of their saturated-looking geometry, this wasn't much of a shock to people paying attention.
If you're worried about your health, exercise and eat a balanced diet. No see-saw there since I was a feckless youth in the seventies, and from what I can read, longer than that.
Posted by: wcw | Feb 8, 2006 12:36:01 PM
Thanks for posting on this, Ezra. As a breast cancer survivor who has read many of the existing studies on fat and cancer, I had a few more problems with the study.
First, breast cancer often takes about 8 years to show up. But you're going to find significant results in breast cancer in an 8 year study?
Second, IIRC the low fat diets tested in prior studies were below 20%. Pretty significantly different than the 29% you cite.
And I DO think you need to think about what kind of fats--if for no other reason than there is the strong suspicion that animal fats contain environmental xenoestrogens that are a leading suspect in causing breast cancer. So take your Mediterranean Diet example one step further. A cow's milk can be concentrated toxins. An olive's oil is going to be much less so. (Fish, though, also concentrate toxins.) So if you eat a low fat diet largely free of animal fat, then you might get different results. FWIW, the studies (again, IIRC) mostly look at total fat, vegetarianism, etc.
Posted by: emptywheel | Feb 8, 2006 3:44:07 PM
Same discussion going over at Feministe, guess I'll just repeat what I posted there.
It is indeed the type of fat that’s important rather than quantity. Besides the fresh
fruits and vegetables in the Mediterranean diet, the olive oil appears to have
positive effects with regard to both heart disease and cancer. To give an idea
of some of the recent developments, here’s a recent related cancer paper and here’s an example of a
heart study.
The worst culprit with heart disease is likely trans fatty acids, as explained
here.
Posted by: gswift | Feb 9, 2006 12:27:11 AM
Ezra,
Speaking as someone who knows a good bit on this topic, you and your commenters are generally right on....this report should be looked at through a very skewed lens.
One caveat, pertaining to "The Diets Weren't Low-Fat, or at least not by much. The normal American diet is 35% fat, by the end of the study, the average woman in the study was consuming 29% of her calories in fat." That's about an 18% decrease in fat intake (assuming the 35 and 29 are the appropriate types of fat). Eighteen percent is a decent drop if one is adjusting their diet for a long-term "lifestyle eating change". Curbing it much more could result in 'fad dieting', meaning the subject would simply rebound after the test and go back to high dieting.
For anyone disagreeing: go change your diet so that you replace 18% of your fat calories with something else, preferrably protein (replacing with carbs is simply replacing donuts with pastries) and watch your waist start to shrink in a few weeks. Eighteen percent is a decent figure for this type of test.
Not that I'm disagreeing with the notion that this test was likely bogus (especially since we don't know what causes many cancers), because I do.
Posted by: RW | Feb 9, 2006 9:10:47 AM
The headline also seems to point to simply ONE direction of dieting. A real diet takes into account all types of intakes. Focusing on just one element of caloric instake is, to put it simply, retarded. Also, having a headline that seems to say that ALL diets with a low-fat intake don't work is really doing a disservice to society.
Focusing on well balanced meals is why South Beach seems to work so well. You aren't just concentrating on carbs (Atkins) or fat (AMA), you recognize types of fats and recognize how the level of sugar in your blood processes those types of fats in your body. Also, we haven't even gotten into cholesterol. A "low" fat diet doesn't necessarily translate into low cholesterol.
For all the good the media can do, their focus on attention grabbing headlines can sometimes be ridiculous.
Posted by: Adrock | Feb 9, 2006 11:40:59 AM
Is there a pointer to the observation about 2/3 of medical studies being overturned that somebody can supply?
Don N.
Posted by: Don N. | Feb 12, 2006 1:37:26 PM
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Posted by: judy | Oct 1, 2007 5:08:21 AM
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