You think carbohydrates aren’t addictive?  You think it’s easy to give them up?  You don’t think it possible that people might prefer carbs to life?

Think again.

A story appeared in the online version of Time Magazine last year that I read when it came out, put aside to blog about later, then got sidetracked.  A reader sent me a link to it a few days ago, which brought it back to the front of my mind.

The article discusses a study being done in Germany using a carb-restricted diet to fight cancer.  In pre-WWII days, a German scientist, Otto Warburg, received a Nobel Prize for his work in sussing out the fact that cancer cells don’t generate energy the same way that normal cells do.  Cancer cells get their energy, not like normal cells, from the mitochondrial oxidation of fat, but from glycolysis, the breakdown of glucose withing the cytoplasm (the liquid part of the cell).  This different metabolism of cancer cells that sets them apart from normal cells is called the Warburg effect.  Warburg thought until his dying day that this difference is what causes cancer, and although it is true that people with elevated levels of insulin and glucose do develop more cancers, most scientists in the field don’t believe that the Warburg effect is the driving force behind the development of cancer.

But it stands to reason that it can be used to treat cancer that is already growing.  Since cancers can’t really get nourishment from anything but glucose, it stands to reason that cutting off this supply would, at the very least, slow down tumor growth, especially in aggressive, fast-growing cancers requiring a lot of glucose to fuel their rapid growth.

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Here we go again. No doubt you’ve seen on T V or read in the news that meat causes colon cancer. At least that’s the take home message you got if you saw any of these ‘news’ reports or read any of the articles about a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) this past week. Let’s take a look at what is really going on.

The study was pretty simple. Researchers looked at the diets of over 1000 subjects who had stage III colon cancer and who were enrolled in a chemotherapy trial. These subjects filled out food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) during their chemotherapy then again six months after. Researchers then stratified the data from the FFQs into what they called a Western dietary pattern and a prudent dietary pattern. After a little over 5 years of follow up about a quarter of these subjects had died from their colon cancer. Significantly more of the patients following the Western dietary pattern died than did those who followed the prudent dietary pattern. Therefore, say these researchers, those who have advanced colon cancer should avoid a Western dietary pattern in favor of a prudent dietary pattern in order to reduce their chances of dying from their disease. And the implication is that all of us should follow the prudent diet rather than a Western diet to maybe avoid getting colon cancer at all. And, as you shall see, what these researchers really want us to avoid is red meat.

Nice and tidy. Problem is that it’s all BS. And it’s the kind of BS that infuriates me because of the dishonesty involved. Let me show you what I mean.

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Newspapers are always on the lookout for man-bites-dog kind of stories to sell papers. The more off beat the story, the more it flies in the face of what seems normal, the more newsworthy it is, at least in the eyes of the inky wretches who publish the dailies. It shows just how deeply ingrained in the minds of so many is the notion that dietary fat is bad for us when a series of studies showing that cutting fat from the diet doesn’t do squat makes the front page headline of the New York Times, the country’s most influential paper. And I don’t mean just the front page, but the actual top-of-the-page, main headline. The idea that fat might not be harmful is apparently a man-bites-dog story of the highest order.

Here’s the headline, right up top.

Low Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Report Says

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Today’s JAMA contains three papers showing that the low-fat diet does not reduce the risk for colon cancer, heart disease or breast cancer.

Data from the giant Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial show that after 8 ½ years post menopausal women consuming a diet meant to contain about 20 percent of calories as fat, but in fact containing about 28 percent of calories as fat, showed no decrease risk for breast cancer, heart disease or colon cancer compared to a control group of women consuming their regular diet.

To read the full text of the paper on breast cancer click here.

To see the abstracts of the other two papers click here and here.

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