The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

English breakfast at our hotel. A good low-carb diet.

It was bound to happen.  Forever the low-fat diet promoters, whenever asked about low-carb diets, would always say: Show me the studies.  Well, we showed them the studies, the vast majority of which demonstrated the superiority of low-carb diet, but they didn’t like what they saw.  So they demanded more.  The rallying cry became: Show me the long-term studies.  Now that those are in, the anti-meat folks are running out of options.  But one of their own great lipophobes (Lipid  = fat; phobic = fear of.  Lipophobe = fearer of fat.), David Jenkins, has come to the rescue.

Since the low-carb diet has proven so effective, opines he, why not make it even more so by making a vegetarian version?  Then dieters can have all the advantages of a low-carb diet along with all the advantages of a plant-based diet.  That is, assuming there are advantages to a plant-based diet, more about which later.

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The news is abuzz with reports of the latest study to come out showing that eating meat, especially red meat, kills us off before our time.  (You can read some of the reporting here, here, here and here.)  Google shows 547 new articles about this study.

Although this study is totally worthless from a causality perspective because it is an observational study, it does serve to confirm the biases of those non-critical thinkers who have already bought into the idea that meat is bad.  To give you an example of such a soft thinker, here is the second comment on the blog post about this study in the New York Times.

I could have told you that 30 years ago. I been a vegetarian for 47 years and I have never seen vegetarians die from heart disease or cancer. They died from basic infectious diseases and malnutrition. Make no mistake it is harder to be a vegetarian than a carnivour but your body does not expel everying [sic] that is in the meat especially red meat.

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Detail from Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death

The Dark Ages were an inglorious period of human history bounded on the one side by the Classical Age and by the Renaissance on the other.   These grim times began when a classical empire was savaged by barbarians plunging the world into a long era of darkness ruled by ignorance, superstition and fear, and ended finally by the intellectual stirrings of the Italian Renaissance.

I believe that the latest dietary study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is an early indicator that our own era of dietary darkness may be coming to an end.

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I’ve had a number of people email me about a new study appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine purportedly showing that statins really do provide benefit to those who take them regularly.  As you can see from the heading of an email piece I pasted above, even Medscape is all over this article and blasting it out to physicians all over the world.

I’m sad to say that this is the same kind of paper I would have been taken in by 20 years ago before I really understood how to read the scientific literature critically.  In fact, I would have used it myself to justify giving statins to all kinds of people, and I’m sure other physicians are doing so right now.  But I would have been in error to base my prescribing on this paper, and all the other docs out there giving statins like they were candy are in error as well.

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