Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

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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A couple of weeks ago I posted on the large JAMA study showing that, contrary to what we’ve heard ad nauseum over the past decade, fiber consumption produced no protective effect against colon cancer. Now comes one of the more bizarre studies that I’ve ever read.

The British journal Colorectal Disease published a paper a few months ago with the promising title “Diet and colorectal cancer: implications for the obese and devotees of the Atkins diet.” Hey, now were getting somewhere thinks I when this little baby fell into my hands through the agency of the university inter-library loan department. Then I began to read it.

I don’t know if medical journals have the equivalent of slow news days or if this particular journal, which I hadn’t previously seen, is a lower tier journal, but I can’t figure how this paper got published. I’m glad it did because most people will only get to read the abstract (my university didn’t have a subscription to the journal, thus my reliance on inter-library loan), and the abstract implies much that isn’t developed in the paper. I’m sure many people writing articles on low-carb diets will in the future reference this paper as one that shows low-carb diets to reduce the risk of colorectal cancer. The paper, however, doesn’t really do that. In fact, it doesn’t do much of anything.

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