A study appeared this week sure to drive members of the low-fat and vegan tribes sprinting for their Protexid.

Ron Krauss and his group published a paper in the Articles in Press section of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) stating there is no evidence that saturated fat intake increases the risk for heart disease.  The paper, titled Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease, is not a study per se, but is a meta-analysis, a compilation of numerous studies looking at the relationship between saturated fat intake and the risk for developing heart disease.

As I’ve discussed before on these pages, meta-analyses are not my favorite types of studies.  I’ve attacked them when they’ve been used to ‘prove’ the low-fat diets are better, so I can’t very well embrace meta-analyses when they present a conclusion I agree with.  And I really can’t embrace meta-analyses when they are compilations of observational studies, which are themselves next to worthless.

For those who don’t know, meta-analyses are compilation studies in which researchers comb the medical literature for papers on a particular subject and then combine all the data  from the individual studies together into one large study.  This combining is often done to bring together a collection of studies, none of which contain data that has reached statistical significance, to see if the aggregate of all the data in the studies reaches statistical significance.  I think these types of meta-analyses are highly suspect, because they can lead to conclusions not warranted by the actual data.

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Applebee's Quesadilla Burger

One of my readers sent me a link to a segment on ABC News with Charlie Gibson showing just how disgustingly slanted and inaccurate mainstream media reports can be.

Gibson leads into the segment about two reporters who underwent self experimentation on the adverse effects of unhealthy eating.  The reporters, ABC’s Yuji de Nies and Jon Garcia, set out to see what would happen if they consumed a giant meal containing over 6,000 calories.  Here is the result as they reported it.

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I have been dilatory in posting over the past few days and embarrassingly dilatory about approving comments.  I’m way, way behind, but I’ll get caught up ultimately.  So, if you have a comment doing time in comment Purgatory, don’t despair.  I will get to it.  Ultimately.

My excuse for not devoting my normal amount of attention to this blog is that I’ve been extremely busy as of late.  MD and I made a quick trip to Seattle to work on our world-changing project, then came back and spent a couple of days at the zoo that is Expo West (more about which momentarily), then the Seattle team came to us and we continued to work.  During all this, MD had a concert in which she had to perform Mozart’s Requiem and Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna (my favorite piece of choral music) along with a couple of lesser pieces.  And tomorrow we drive back to Tahoe.  So, we’ve been busy little beavers and this blog has suffered.

Expo West has got to be the world’s largest natural foods expo.  It takes place every year at about this time in Anaheim.  And every year at about this time we drag ourselves to it.  The photo at the top of this blog represents one tiny little portion of this gathering.  To see how huge it is, take a look at the photo below of the map of the thing.

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Paleolithic paintings from Lascaux cave in southern France

I imagine most readers of this blog would expect a group of subjects to do better on a Paleolithic diet as compared to a standard American diet, but there are few studies actually making the comparison. One was posted yesterday in the Advance-0nline-Publication section of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition that shows subjects following a Paleolithic diet made major metabolic changes, and made them rapidly.

Before we get into the study, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when we discuss the Paleolithic diet. We we say Paleolithic diet, what are we really talking about?

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