Last week a host of reports about a study showing that eating a big breakfast brings about a much greater weight loss than eating a smaller breakfast saturated the media. Predictably, the press was all over this report with varying flavors or reporting depending upon the reporters biases. Some, obviously carb biased, reported from a high-carb perspective; others – more well-balanced, no doubt – reported from that bias. Others simply focused on the ‘big.’ Let’s see what’s going on here.

The first thing one must realize is that this is not a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, this is a poster presentation at a medical meeting, in this case the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society held in San Francisco last week. A while back I wrote at length on the difference between this type of presentation and a paper that has gone through the peer-review process. Poster presentations such as this one go through a sort of peer review process when they are presented in the sense that attendees ask questions and point out weaknesses. But the public never sees this. The public sees the press reports about these presentations without the peer review. Papers that are published run through the peer-review gauntlet before they see the light of day and are ever reported on.

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Ancel Keys, Ph.D.

Once again I’m putting up a post out of sequence. I just found this great video on the life of Ancel Keys that I wanted to make available to all readers of this blog.

Keys video high bandwidth download

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The notion that the pharmaceutical industry fiddles with drug studies is one that I harp on constantly. Sometimes they fiddle with the data interpretation process, but more commonly they commit what amounts to lies of omission.

Here’s what most do. If a drug company spends millions of dollars to sponsor a study designed to show that Drug X reduces inflammation and finds when all the data is assessed at the end that Drug X does indeed reduce inflammation to some extent, then you can bet that the company will rush the study in to print. But if this study instead of showing improvement shows that Drug X doesn’t help reduce inflammation or, horror of horrors, actually makes it worse, odds are that the company won’t publish the study.

We end up with a situation in which mainly positive studies get published. These positive studies then lend a aura of efficacy that really doesn’t exist to most of the drugs out there. No one can really point to studies nay saying the drugs in question since those studies were never published.

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Once again the dishonesty or maybe sheer stupidity of scientists bowls me over. I got an email from an old patient a couple of days ago who is following a low-carb diet while under the care of a skeptical (to say the least) cardiologist. The cardiologist sent the patient an email with a link to a Cardiosource (an online resource for cardiologists) commentary on an article in this month’s issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The paper compared a standard high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet (HCLF) to a very-low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet (VLCHF) in terms of blood lipid changes. The Cardiosource commentary seized on the last two lines in the abstract of the paper.

…although both diets had similar improvements for a number of metabolic risk markers, the HCLF diet had more favorable effects on the blood lipid profile. This suggests that the potential long-term health effects of high- and low-carbohydrate weight loss diets remain a concern, and that blood lipid levels should be monitored in obese subjects with the metabolic syndrome.

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I’ve learned from Tom Naughton that his new movie is titled Fat Head and carries the tagline You’ve been fed a load of bologna. Tom has also graciously agreed to answer all your questions about the movie so fire away. Submit any questions you might have as comments, and Tom will answer them in a blog post within a few days.

I’m putting up the rest of the clips from the movie on today’s post.

The sequence of these clips as they will appear in the movie is as follows: Read more »