Do statinators dream of engineered mice?
A paper appeared recently in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that seems to have a whole lot of people on edge. If you read the press accounts of this study, you might think anyone stupid enough to follow a low-carb diet would be doomed to certain death from heart attack. But is that the case? Or is it simply another instance of the media either failing to understand how science works or, worse, misreporting to get a better story?
I suspect the latter, but before we get into it, I need to go over a few blog housekeeping issues.
As I’m sure everyone has noticed, the look of this blog has changed – as has the look of the entire website. Our designer and tech guys have been struggling to get everything working right, but, finally, my incessant whining got to them, and they went ahead and put the thing up in its not-completed state. Please bear with us – it will ultimately work as it’s supposed to. If you are having a problem, send me a description in the comments section. Make sure you tell me what kind of computer you’re using (Mac (Intel or pre-Intel) or PC) and which browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) so that the gurus will know what to do to fix it.
I know the comments are screwed up right now, but don’t worry, they’ll be fixed. Go ahead and comment away. They’ll ultimately be up in a form you can recognize.
Once we get the blogs and website how they’re supposed to be, I’ll write a post describing all the features.
Also, our world-changing project has been slightly delayed through no fault of our own. The new date for revelation has been pushed back from Sept 1 to Sept 15. Sorry. It’s been a real PITA for us, too.
Now, back to the PNAS paper.
As we all know, media reports can be totally misleading or even downright false. Reporters have their own biases that creep into their work, and even when reporters think they are presenting the facts, they often report just one side of a story and ignore the other. And, as we’ve seen from the previous post on the vitamin D-bate, reporters may just report a story in a way that makes for better reading without any regard for the substance of the issues.
The PNAS paper reported a study on genetically modified rodents, engineered to be more susceptible to heart disease. As I’ve written many times in these pages, mice and rats aren’t just furry little humans – they are a different species altogether. And although they are often used for medical experiments, the conclusions from the experiments cannot be applied to humans. Like observational studies, rodent data can be used to establish hypotheses about human health and disease, hypotheses that can then be tested for validity.
In this case, the data on these genetically-engineered mice can’t even be extrapolated to normal mice much less humans. Knowing just this much about the study tells us that whatever it shows has little relevance to us. But that’s not what the media took away from the story.
The BBC came out with the following headlines that were picked up by a number of other media sources:
Low-carb diets ‘damage arteries’
And followed up with:
Low-carb slimming diets may clog arteries and increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, a study suggests.
Diets based on eating lots of meat, fish and cheese, while restricting carbohydrates have grown in popularity in recent years.
But the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in the US found such habits caused artery damage in tests on mice.
The researchers and independent experts both agreed a balanced diet was the best option.
Hmmm. Sounds pretty brutal doesn’t it. No hesitance there. No equivocation. Just a head on reporting of the facts. I don’t think so.
Why not? A number of reasons. First, these researchers basically had a bias going in that low-carb diets cause heart disease even though they lower cholesterol and bring about other positive changes in lipid values, most notably reducing triglycerides, increasing HDL levels, and changing LDL particles from the small type B to the larger type A variety. All of which changes, by the way, supposedly reduce the risk for heart disease.
The lead author of the study, Shi Yin Foo, MD, PhD, a clinical cardiologist,
first embarked on this investigation after seeing heart-attack patients who were on these diets – and after observing Rosenzweig [the researcher in whose lab she worked] himself following a low-carbohydrate regimen.
“Over lunch, I’d ask Tony [the aforementioned Rosenzweig] how he could eat that food and would tell him about the last low-carb patient I’d admitted to the hospital,” says Foo. “Tony would counter by noting that there were no controls for my observations.”
“Finally,” adds Rosenzweig, “I asked Shi Yin to do the mouse experiment – so that we could know what happens in the blood vessels and so that I could eat in peace.”
Do you think Dr. Foo has a little skin in this game? Think she might have a motive for stacking the deck a little in setting this experiment up in a way that encourages a certain outcome? This was not what you would call an unbiased quest for the truth.
I want to comment on something here as an aside. I don’t know how old Dr. Foo is, but since she’s working in someone else’s lab, I would think she’s probably fairly new to the medical game. She may have admitted a patient or two to the hospital with heart attacks, who, under questioning, may have admitted to following a low-carb diet at some point. But I’m willing to put my experience with low-carb diets up against hers any day. MD and I have followed over 10,000 patients on low-carb diets and have never had a single one have a heart attack. So, I really doubt that Dr. Foo has admitted many – if any – patients who are actively following a low-carb diet. But it does make for a good story.
Second, we’ve already mentioned that the mice were genetically engineered to be more susceptible to heart disease, so data generated from these rodents can’t be extrapolated even to other mice let alone to humans.
Third, the diet used wasn’t even a typical low-carb diet. The researchers
had a diet specially made that would mimic a typical low-carb diet,” explains Foo. “In order to keep the calorie count the same in all three diets, we had to substitute a nutrient to replace the carbohydrates. We decided to substitute protein because that is what people typically do when they are on these diets.”
Oh, really? This one statement shows Dr. Foo’s ignorance of low-carbohydrate dieting. People don’t typically “substitute protein” when they go on a low-carb diet. As anyone knows who has been on one, people substitute fat, the macronutrient that provides most of the calories on any low-carb diet. The mice in this study were getting 45 percent of their calories from protein, which can be done, but isn’t what one finds in most typical low-carb diets.
MD and I have been traveling extensively lately, so I hadn’t really had the time yet to delve deeply into this study, but, fortunately, as it turns out, I didn’t have to. Others have done it for me.
The Metabolism Society issued a press release on the paper to all its members. You can read it in full below:
Researchers use mutant mice genetically engineered to be susceptible to heart disease to ‘prove’ carbohydrate restricted diets may harm arteries.
Defects in ApoE -/- result in defects in processing blood cholesterol.
As human studies continue to show the benefits of low carbohydrate diets and the general failure of low-fat diets, it is necessary for the nutritional establishment to find more and more obscure methods of attacking dietary carbohydrate restriction.
One method is to prepare mutant animal models, to use odd diets that humans would never consume, call them low carbohydrate diets and then show some deficit. Because mice are not generally susceptible to atherosclerosis, it was necessary for Foo and coworkers to use an ApoE-/- mutant and a ridiculously high protein diet to vilify low carbohydrate diets which have been a useful alternative for many people suffering from obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
In keeping with the traditions in scientific research, the authors do not cite the numerous studies showing benefit of low carbohydrate diets compared to the low fat diet that has been in place during the obesity and diabetes epidemic. That the NIH and other government agencies continue to fund this kind of biased research is probably a minor political problem in health care but should still be of concern to people who are confused about what their diet should be.
According to Dr. Richard D. Feinman, Biochemistry Professor at Downstate Medical Center in NY, “It is a mistake to consider one experiment in a mouse mutant over riding the scientific literature where similar research trials on actual human beings clearly show benefit of carbohydrate restriction for all markers of metabolic syndrome. For some reason these studies are not the ones picked up by the media. I suppose actual advances in science aren’t hot topics for headline news stories when it concerns the proven benefits of carbohydrate restriction.
Volek JS, Ballard KD, Silvestre R, Judelson DA, Quann EE, Forsythe CE, Fernandez ML, Kraemer WJ: Effects of dietary carbohydrate restriction vs low-fat diet on flow-mediated dilation. Metabolism 2009.
Volek JS, Phinney SD, Forsythe CE, Quann EE, Wood RJ, Puglisi MJ, Kraemer WJ, Bibus DM, Fernandez ML, Feinman RD: Carbohydrate restriction has a more favorable impact on the metabolic syndrome than a low fat diet. Lipids 2009, 44(4):297-309.
Of course, as you might expect, the press release wasn’t picked up by any of the major media outlets.
Jimmy Moore weighed in on the issue in an article in the Examiner.com in which he quotes numerous experts who have their say on this study.
And, Peter at Hyperlipid wrote two great posts taking the researchers to task and exploring the kind of protein used and various other aspects of this study. (Here and here.)
So, I was left with nothing more to add other than to say what I’ve said countless times before: Don’t rely on media reports to tell you anything.
(With apologies to Philip K. Dick for the title of this post.)
‘Hypocholesterolemia in Hairy Cell Leukemia: A Marker for Proliferative Activity’, Pandolfino et al, Am J of Hematology 55: 129-133 (1997)
and Cholesterol May Play Cancer-Prevention Role at Cellular Level
‘OSBP Is a Cholesterol-Regulated Scaffolding Protein in Control of ERK1/2 Activation’, Ping-yuan et al, Science 307: 472 ( March 2005)
I like the new look, but would ask for one thing: because I mainly view this blog on my iPhone, it would really nice to have the option to default the order comments are displayed in to newest first, or have a button to scroll to the last comment. It takes a lot of scrolling to get to the latest comment on many of your posts.
Can’t wait to get my copy of your latest…it’s been on advance order from Amazon for a year now.
Thanks. I’ll pass the suggestion along to my web guys.
Dr Eades,
Your patronising attack on Dr. Foo because she is a youngish female, and ( horror !) younger than you, scarcely does you credit and makes it difficult to take what else you have to say seriously.
I am also not sure why you had to put in her full name and degrees in – were you trying to draw attention to her ethnicity and sneer at her qualifications ?
Please remove the offending passage about Dr. Foo from your blog and an apology to her would be nice as well.
This is a joke, right? Or are you out of your mind? Her name is her name. I clipped it right out of the interview that was done with her. The vast majority of people in this world are younger than I am. And half of them are female. So does that mean that anytime I mention someone from this large group of people I’m being some kind of an ‘ist?’ As in misogynist, racist, ageist, etc.
My commentary had nothing to do with her gender, age or ethnicity. It was about her obvious bias. Sorry if offends you, but I’m not altering the post. I suggest you read elsewhere.
Please remove the attack on the young female scientist from your blog. It is inappropriate and lessens your credibility.
Sorry, but I don’t view it as an attack. Let’s call it an academic disagreement: I’ve seen much worse in prestigious academic journals. And let’s see what other readers say. Are any of the rest of you offended by my critique of Dr. Foo’s article?
Here’s the passage in question, this isn’t a “critique” of an article, it’s patronising middle aged white male stuff
“I want to comment on something here as an aside. I don’t know how old Dr. Foo is, but since she’s working in someone else’s lab, I would think she’s probably fairly new to the medical game. She may have admitted a patient or two to the hospital with heart attacks, who, under questioning, may have admitted to following a low-carb diet at some point. But I’m willing to put my experience with low-carb diets up against hers any day. MD and I have followed over 10,000 patients on low-carb diets and have never had a single one have a heart attack. So, I really doubt that Dr. Foo has admitted many – if any – patients who are actively following a low-carb diet. But it does make for a good story.”
I’m a middle-aged, white male, so I suppose you could be accused of patronizing me. That said, I stand by what I wrote. What’s got me curious, however, is why you have leapt to Dr. Foo’s defense on this issue. What’s the connection?
As far as whether or not I was out of line, I’ll let my readers comment. Other than posting their comments, I’m out of the loop on this one. I wasted enough time on it.
Dr. Mike, yes – I was offended by your Foo commentary. I was offended that you let this pseudo-scientist off so lightly.
Don’t let it happen again.
She’s not really a pseudo scientist. She has both MD and Ph.D degrees, so she should be well-educated. But, by her own admission, she is biased in this situation, and that makes for sloppy science.
A quick scan through the “bogus studies” posts reveals the majority of studies Dr. Eades has debunked were done by male researchers. Does that mean he hates men?
I’m female and I wasn’t offended by your Foo comment; in fact, I’ll risk saying something probably more offensive.
Dr. Foo is probably an “over-achiever” who played it safe by getting both degrees because she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be a real scientist or a clinical practitioner. I know a lot of MD-PhDs, male and female, and that’s my impression of the majority of them. Training for scientists and physicians is quite different; one predominantly seeks new knowledge and questions everything; the other predominantly puts into practice what is thought to be known. Neither require both types of training.
Be careful. You probably shouldn’t use her name. You risk being labeled a racist. Yeesh.
Peter’s comments were pretty bizarre, they have to be a joke. Suggesting posting her name is racist is just too funny. And you specifically said you don’t know how old she is, you were questioning her experience not her age which seems fair. For all we know she went back to school later in life and is 62.
I guess Peter would have you say “Dr X (name withheld) said his/her (sex withheld) study found the following. LOL. Can you imagine if the press did this? “President X (name withheld) said his/her (sex withheld) policy must pass congress soon.
Steve G wrote…
“Peter’s comments were pretty bizarre, they have to be a joke. Suggesting posting her name is racist is just too funny”.
Hi Steve.
if you read my original comment you will see that I did not suggest anybody was racist, I did not even use the word “racist”, I asked a question.
It was Dr. Eades himself who introduced the word “racist” to the discussion. Hmmm … at least he appreciates how his actions might be seen and interpreted by others.
Agreed. I introduced the term ‘racist’ into the discussion. What you accused me of was using her name (and degrees) to try “to draw attention to her ethnicity and sneer at her qualifications.” Questioning whether I was trying to “draw attention to her ethnicity” is tantamount to questioning whether or not I’m racist. And that was clearly the implication whether you used the word or not. I would have used her name had it been Jones or Smith.
Dr.Eades
“Agreed. I introduced the term ‘racist’ into the discussion. What you accused me of was using her name (and degrees) to try “to draw attention to her ethnicity and sneer at her qualifications.” Questioning whether I was trying to “draw attention to her ethnicity” is tantamount to questioning whether or not I’m racist. ”
No, I didn’t “accuse” you of anything, read my OP , I asked a question!!!
You said your use of her full name ( why not just Dr.Foo or even just Foo if you are being trully academic) and degrees was purely innocent cut and paste and I accept that.
I don’t understand why you and your acolytes are misrepresenting my post. Is there a bit of guilty conscience there about personal abuse of the researcher rather than discussiojn of the research ? ( that’s another reflective question incidentally not an “accusation”)
BTW it is nice to see you now stepping in and defending Dr.Foo against the wilder personal abuse of your followers but YOU lowered the tone and started the personal abuse of Dr. Foo, they merely picked up the baton that you passed to them.
In general Dr.Eades “don’t shoot the messenger”.
After my almost four years of pretty continuous blogging, I think I’ve encountered my first internet troll. I had read about them and wondered where they all were on my blog. Now it seems I’ve caught one. And, based on what I’ve read, the best way to get rid of them is ignore them. Or don’t post their comments. Haven’t decided if I’ll take the second option, but I’m definitely taking the first.
Here we go again with another study that appears to have been intentionally designed to produce a negative outcome for high fat (low carb) diets.
Do High-fat Diets Make Us Stupid And Lazy? Physical And Memory Abilities Of Rats Affected After 9 Days
ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2009) — Rats fed a high-fat diet show a stark reduction in their physical endurance and a decline in their cognitive ability after just nine days, a study by Oxford University researchers has shown.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090811143548.htm
I recently came across another study that concluded that high fat, not high insulin levels, causes insulin resistance suggesting that type II diabetes is caused by eating a low carb, high fat diet. According to the mainstream experts we need a high carbohydrate, high fiber, low fat diet to maintain BG levels, regular bowel movements and body weight. We are also told that saturated fat is bad for us while vegetable oils are healthy.
Does anyone see a pattern here? Fiber and vegetable oils are all embodied in carbohydrate foods. So any way you slice it a high fiber or a low fat diet is by default a high carbohydrate diet. Thus when an organization such as the ADA finally appears to relent and says that lower carb diets may be beneficial for some diabetics and then in the same sentence states it should have low fat they are playing us.
Very, very true.
What a great response, Dr. Eades!
By the way, I got an early copy of the book, too,
and I’ve read it! Oh, my goodness! It is an
amazing book, and I hope you sell a gazillion
copies! The world will be a better place!
Thanks for the kind review of the book. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Dr. Mike
What you wrote on “Dr. X” was spot on and pretty darn polite. I am a pretty active liberal but this kind of over sensitivity and political correctness just chaps my hide.
Thanks for the support, LC. Had it occurred to me at the time instead of later, I would have titled my blog post about that paper A Ship of Foos. Wonder what kind of heat I would’ve taken for that?
“Thanks for the support, LC. Had it occurred to me at the time instead of later, I would have titled my blog post about that paper A Ship of Foos. Wonder what kind of heat I would’ve taken for that?”
None more than such an hominum ( or should that be ad feminum ) attack would deserve.
I was disppointed to learn that this is not the first time you have attempted to dismiss research findings because the researchers were young female scientists – there was your attack of two such scientists as “chicks”, not to be taken seriously, a couple of years ago.
I suppose that having found a “cure” for something in your new book you are going to get nominated for the Nobel Prize for Medicine ?
“This is a joke, right? Or are you out of your mind? ”
The latter. He has been banned from an internet forum twice so is now trolling elsewhere. As a Type 2 who has rapidly progressed onto insulin through his following a low fat diet the result of his opinions speak for themselves rather.
“After my almost four years of pretty continuous blogging, I think I’ve encountered my first internet troll. I had read about them and wondered where they all were on my blog. Now it seems I’ve caught one. And, based on what I’ve read, the best way to get rid of them is ignore them. Or don’t post their comments. Haven’t decided if I’ll take the second option, but I’m definitely taking the first.”
http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
HTH
Thanks for a heads up. I figured as much. He struck again moments ago, but I posted and ignored. Next step will be to delete.
A Nobel, what a great idea! What’s the first step? I’d nominate both Dr. Mary Dan and Dr. Mike since they are collaborators.
Please don’t nominate us. I don’t want to have to prepare the speech that has to be given upon acceptance of the award.
Oh dear
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt.support.diabetes/browse_thread/thread/f79b6aaa273e46eb/87a3de8d58c79633?hl=en&q=#87a3de8d58c79633
now I can see what was occurring, someone posted a list of essential blogs and he is going through said list insulting the bloggers, Peter at Hyperlipid was first, or was it Jenny at Diabetes Update? Probably Jenny, he likes making misogenistic attacks even more than insulting men.
I can’t remember now, did you also get hit by the High Eveything Diet guy? He self-destructed quite violently on Hyperlipid. Also there seems to be a high level of carbophilic trolling on some diabetes forums, you’d almost think someone was organising it. Either that or it’s a previously undiagnosed symptom of carbohydrate toxicity.
This guy is a real nimrod as evidenced by his saying that on my Twitter page I’m listed as a Bio Physician, then asking what a bio physician is. Does he not realize that that means Bio as in Biography. And that the first thing I put was ‘physician.’ So, my bio says I’m a physician, not a Bio Physician. This is really telling.
I did get hit by the High Everything Diet guy, who later wrote me via the comments that he had discovered his error when the High Everything Diet didn’t really work for him. He wrote to apologize. I didn’t post the comment because I felt like it was more a personal note to me than a public statement.
These people (the first guy, Peter C) must not have lives if they can spend this inordinate amount of time fooling with stuff like this. As I wrote to someone else, had I had my wits about me, I would have titled the blog post ‘Ship of Foos.’ That would have really set him off.
“had I had my wits about me, I would have titled the blog post ‘Ship of Foos.’ ”
Then you would be a Net-Wit.
(No need to post this–just teasing you)
P.S. “It’s been a real PITA for us, too.”
Shouldn’t you be using the correct medical term–proctalgia ?