Olmsted County, MN

A recent paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine should give pause to those dispensing statins like candy. According to some fairly persuasive autopsy data, it appears that the rate of heart disease may be back on the rise after being in a slow decline over the past 40 years.

In Olmsted County, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, autopsies are much more common than in other parts of the country. So much so that the autopsy records of this county are often used in scientific inquiry as a surrogate for the country as a whole. Autopsies used to be more common nationwide but had fallen in 2003 to only 8.3 percent of deaths. Autopsies are conducted in Olmsted County at rates an order of magnitude greater than they are throughout the rest of the country.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post showing how the press fails to mention low-carb diets in weight loss stories, focusing instead on exercise or some other facet of an individual’s quest to lose weight and improve health. Today we’ll look at how the press, in an effort to minimize the untoward effects of carbohydrates on health, sometimes simply misrepresents the true outcome of studies.

A week or so ago a Swedish study (click here for a pdf) was released looking at the short term effects on the liver of a diet high in fast food. ABC News reported the study. Let’s first look at what the study was all about and what the data showed, then we’ll see how ABC reported it. By looking carefully at what ABC did to misrepresent the study, we can arm ourselves with the knowledge to identify this kind of press bias in future reporting.

First the study.

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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 »

A little over a year ago I wrote about how MD and I had been interviewed on camera for a documentary being made to respond to Morgan Spurlock’s popular movie Super Size Me. Tom Naughton, the producer of the anti-Super Size Me film, spent a few hours with us and even contributed to this blog with his answers to the many of the questions my readers had for him. Today I received word from Tom that the film is pretty much finished.

He sent me a few YouTubes of short segments of the movie so that readers could get a taste of what’s coming. I’ll post these over the next couple of days.

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I would rather take a beating than eat fast food. I do know, however, that others enjoy it. I used to enjoy the taste of it myself even though I knew it was terrible for me, but now I’ve read so many bad things about it that I just about can’t bring myself to eat it.

While roaming through the web looking for other data I stumbled upon a blog that contains what I think is an incredibly useful load of info for anyone trying to stay on a diet of any kind and still indulge in fast food. The writer of this blog – a Calorie Counter – has undertaken a prodigious task, at least by my reckoning. He (I’m pretty sure it’s a he) has gone to the time and trouble to wade through all the nutritional information provided by the various purveyors of fast food and tabulated them all for comparison. The hamburgers compared to other hamburgers; the fries to other fries; the chicken sandwiches to other chicken sandwiches. (Click here for the charts)

Says the author: Read more »