One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round

Posted by Valerie on February 26, 2009

The media can’t understand medical research to save anyone’s life, and as usual the researchers show every sign of wanting to keep it that way. Take a look at these headlines….

Low-carb? Low-fat? Study finds calories count more

It’s Not What You Eat, It’s How Much

What’s the Best Diet? Eating Less Food

Diets that count calories work just as well as Atkins, shows research

This isn’t news reporting. And the last headline is entirely unaccountable, except by bias.

My guess is that not one person reporting on this for the major news outlets has taken the time to read the new study that came out in the New England Journal of Medicine this week. Please take the reporting with a grain of salt until you do. I read the study twice, and I learned that it didn’t compare the effectiveness of various calorie intakes, nor did it test any low-carb diet, let alone Atkins. And yet, here’s the conclusion of the authors, in their own words, “Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasize.”

Here’s what the study actually showed:

1. Four variations of a very high carb diet were equally ineffective in promoting long-term weight loss.

2. 17 researchers were willing to call an average 7# weight loss over two years ”clinically meaningful,” as a ploy to grab headlines.

In which physician’s office anywhere  is a patient today hearing, “Congratulations, Joe! Since 2007, you’ve gone from 238# down to 231#! That’s clinically meaningful!”

3. Researchers are once again displaying a bias against testing any published low-carb plan or any variation of any published low-carb plan.

No study that ever resulted in a “low carb diets don’t work” headline has ever tested anything remotely similar to a low-carb diet. Feel free to try to prove me wrong, but not one.

I could go on, but Dr. Mike will probably be writting about this within 48 hours, if he hasn’t already.

The conclusion and reporting of this study is just one more “load of bologna” from “indispensable government-funded research.” Just remember this: Back when the government wasn’t at war with the citizens’ natural dietary inclinations, we didn’t have an obesity epidemic.

I want you to meet a couple of guys….

Jimmy Moore

and

Kent Altena