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| http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Stor...1649461,00.html
Druin Burch
Thursday November 24, 2005
The Guardian
There's no bullshit like dietary advice. It starts off with a dumb observation
that someone hasn't bothered to think through or an experiment so badly designed
that it never stood a chance of revealing anything reliable. Then people who
don't understand it - or who won't take the trouble to try - puff it up and it
ends up getting spewed out as though it were an accepted truth. But today it's
my excuse for being cheerful, for offering you at least a little bit of good
news.
I can do so courtesy of last week's Journal of the American Medical Association.
It included a small but sensible randomised trial of three different diets, fed
over six-week periods to 164 people from Baltimore and Boston. All the diets
were low in saturated fat, matching current recommendations. But each one chose
something different to replace the saturated fat with. The first took
carbohydrates, the second protein and the third unsaturated fats. (If you think
of saturated fat as being solid at room temperature and unsaturated as being
liquid oil - then you won't be far wrong. Artificially saturated fats -
unsaturated ones that have been "hydrogenated" - are what Marks & Spencer last
week announced it would be banning.)
Each diet made Americans healthier. Blood pressure went down and fat profiles
changed. But the carbohydrate diet - the traditional one that most medical
authorities have spent the past few decades recommending on the basis of
third-rate evidence - came off worst. The drop in blood pressure was biggest for
those eating lots of protein but it was only a fraction behind in the people
eating lots of unsaturated fats - and their blood levels of good cholesterol
went up.
Six weeks isn't a huge time for a dietary intervention trial, and it's
disappointing that the Americans took the short-cut of looking at risk factors -
blood pressure and fats - rather than the long-term events of heart attacks,
strokes and diabetes that we're really interested in. But compared to the
catastrophically bad level of evidence that dietary advice is usually based on,
this trial was golden. And it adds weight to other evidence suggesting that the
high-carbohydrate advice was just one more piece of rubbish that the media and
medical profession pushed without having had the evidence to back it up.
As long as you don't put on weight, you don't have to bludgeon yourself with
bowls of unadulterated brown rice or oil-free wholemeal pasta. That's at least a
little bit cheerful.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Stor...1649461,00.html
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
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