More on the ‘low-carb’ study at the AHA meeting
I have a close friend who was an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 13 years, during which time he broke a number of large stories. He left the WSJ to start a company to help businesses deal with the media. He had seen from the inside how businesses had tried to influence him and his colleagues, and he knew the business men were going about it all wrong. For the last 15 years or so he’s helped them get it right.
A couple of times per year my friend puts on seminars for people wanting to learn about how the media work. He invited me to one a few years ago in Las Vegas, and I can tell you, it was an eye-opening experience. The program started with my friend asking the attendees to write a few sentences describing what they thought constituted ‘news.’ Before you read on, stop for a moment and come up with your own definition of news. Have you got it? At this meeting virtually everyone (including yours truly and his lovely wife) came up with something on the order of: ‘News is when something happens of sufficient importance to the readers or viewers of a particular media format in a defined local (could be local – could be national) that it requires reporting.’
My friend gathered the papers and started reading them to the group. One after the other was a variation on the theme above. After he had read a dozen or so, he looked at the crowd and said: “Let me define news for you. News is what the media wants you to know.”
In the previous post I wrote the media wanted you to know that the Atkins diet was dangerous, so that’s how they reported it. A reported went in to an oral poster presentation, a tiny sub-meeting of the larger overall meeting, and reported on non-peer reviewed data in such a way as to make a perfectly safe and sensible way of eating, practiced by literally millions of people over the last 30 years, appear to be a danger to health. That’s news because that reporter and his editors said it was.
I’m stressing this because the American Heart Association (AHA) also reports the news, which, in its case, is what it wants people to know. The AHA has an entire publicity arm that sends reports out to doctors all over the world telling them what the AHA wants them to know. And guess what? In none of these reports is the study on the Atkins diet mentioned.
I got these reports by email for every day of the conference. You can click on them by day – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday – to see what the AHA wanted doctors interested in this conference to know. If you burrow down into all the links and follow where they lead, you’ll find that none of them (at least none that I could find) lead to the Atkins diet presentation. Probably because the study wasn’t very important relative to the others, and because any one with a modicum of scientific understanding would see right through it.
But not the public. Members of the public aren’t trained to even find the relevant study much less analyze it critically. So that’s where the reports were sent. To the public. Not to the doctors. I find it interesting to say the least.
One other thing, then we’re through with this travesty of a study. A number of people wrote comments wondering about the inflammatory markers that went up in the folks who went on the pseudo Atkins diet. Here is the full text of a study done by Jeff Volek and his group at the University of Connecticut showing that real low-carb diets bring about a decrease in inflammatory markers. And here is another demonstrating that real low-carb diets bring about improvements in atherogenic lipid profiles in subjects who do not lose weight. So, it’s the diet that does it, not the weight loss that usually accompanies such a diet.
Dear Dr. Mike,
Here’s a very appropriate Dilbert:
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/071031/cx_dilbert_umedia/20073110
Laurel
Perfect!!!!
Dear Dr. Eades,
In a previous comment Dusty recommended this blog: http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com
by Sandy Szwarc BSN, RN, CCP. She wrote on 10/27/07:
“Similarly, many believe that only carbohydrates in the diet stimulate insulin production and that high-carb diets are responsible for obesity and illness, but this is a “a very undeserved reputation based on false and twisted truths,” explains Kathy Goodwin, R.D. “The truth is that all ingested foods stimulate insulin production.” And even population studies completely contradict such fears, she said. In Japan, for instance, high carb foods like white rice [with a GI higher than pure sucrose] is a daily staple, yet Japan “has one of the lowest rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer and diabetes in the world.” Again and again, the science supports there being nothing magical in the foods we eat or that there is one perfect diet.”
Your comments?
Laurel
I said that I enjoyed this blog from time to tiem, not that I agreed with everything that appears in it. The quote you sent is typical R.D. swill.
Cheers–
MRE
Here’s another great study.
Low-Carb Diet May Slow Prostate Tumor Growth
Mouse study could have implications for humans, researchers say
http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/healthday/071113/low-carb-diet-may-slow-prostate-tumor-growth.htm
“They compared tumor growth in mice eating either a low-carbohydrate diet; a low-fat but high-carbohydrate diet; or a Western diet high in fat and carbohydrates.
Mice fed the low-carbohydrate diet had the smallest tumor size and longest survival, the team found.
“”Low-fat mice had shorter survival and large tumors , while mice on the Western diet had the worst survival and biggest tumors. In addition, though both the low-carb and low-fat mice had lower levels of insulin, only the low-carb mice had lower levels of the form of IGF capable of stimulating tumor growth,” Freedland said.”
This is a completely reasonable and predictable outcome that is consistent with the diseases associated with the Western diet.
Hi David–
Thanks for the link. There are studies that show the same thing in humans.
BTW, I still haven’t heard back from Dave Dixon. I’ll retry.
Cheers–
MRE
You know Dr. Mike,
It was the AHA that convinced me that the Atkins diet was not only safe, but it was better than their own diet. This was reported a tad over 5 years ago. Shortly after the news report I resolved to begin the Atkins diet. What dissapointed me was how they played down Atkins and said something like ” More studies need to be made so don’t just jump into it”. A few weeks later, Dr A was interviewed by Larry King. He was being congratulated for being right after all these years. Then he dies a few months later from what the media wants us to believe was obesity. I learned then not to trust the media. Recently there was a report on the news about the dangers of the Atkins Diet, I forget what it was about but I wrote the news station that ran the story. I asked them why would they run a study on this diet about how it proved safe and it didn’t contribute to heart disease then a few month’s later say that it was dangerous. They both can’t be true.
The study I read in Web MD on prostate cancer used the word “no carb”, which I thought the medical world was beyond that terminology. This study really caught my attention since prostate cancer runs in my husband’s family. My husband is consuming fewer carbohydrates then he did 5 years ago but I hope this encourages him to become a little stricter.
The truth about that glorified poison, carbohydrates, is important information to the public that gets muffled in newsroom techno-babble. I pick and choose my information according to what I already know and grit my teeth through everything else. I am grateful to your blog Dr. Mike.
Thanks,
Mary
Thank you for reading. Mary.
I’ll try to keep the flow of information going.
Best–
MRE
Why do people get all choked up when someone refers to Atkins as a high-fat diet? It IS a high-fat diet. It’s *supposed* to be a high-fat diet. Where the critics mess up is where they say it is a high-*protein* diet. We only ever need enough protein to rebuild body tissues–not just muscle–and should be prioritizing fat as an energy source if we’re eating low-carb. I know there are low-carb “experts” out there who want us to believe otherwise, but as only about ten percent of the fat we eat is ever turned into glucose versus fifty-eight percent of protein when there is no other energy source, and as many of us tend to follow low-carb diets in the first place because our glucose metabolisms are all wacky, I think that ignoring low-fat dogma must be extended to ignoring folks on the low-carb side of the debate who can’t let that dogma die.
As for Junk Food Science, the blog lives up to the name. Sugar’s harmless, huh?
Do you feel better now having gotten all that off your chest? Feel free to rant here any time.
Of course, you are correct.
Cheers–
MRE