The title comes from an article by John Tierney on his blog [Tierney Lab: Putting Ideas in Science to the Test].
It's not really news. Low-fat diets have been challenged for years. There is good evidence that the Atkins diet really works for some people and it's healthy. Tierny gives us a quotation from a recent New York Times article that reported on a massive study recently completed.
The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.All studies on human diets and nutrition are suspect, in my opinion. It's just the nature of the game. There are always contradictory results.
The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.
‘’These studies are revolutionary,'’ said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. ‘’They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy.'’
I'm not going to say that fat is never bad for you. What I say is that you should be skeptical about all claims concerning diet and health. They all need to be taken with a grain of salt (and a pound of steak
). Whenever you hear someone claiming to have all the answers you can dismiss them without a second thought. Nobody has the answers in this field, and that includes Professors, scientists, and physicians.
I think the main reason medics tended at first to dismiss Atkins was because of the over-the-top way he pushed his story. If I’m not mistaken, he used to claim that if you followed his dietary advice, you could just eat and eat, maintain your normal exercise routine and still lose weight. Taken literally that’s got to be nuts – apart from anything else it would violate the First Law of Thermodynamics.
ReplyDeleteNow I don’t read the nutrition literature, so I’m working from memory, but I seem to recall the Dunn Human Nutrition Unit running a test of the Atkins diet some years ago. Indeed they did find that volunteers on the Atkins diet lost weight faster than others on more conventional diets. When they looked at their data, it turned out that the Atkins volunteers were simply eating less, even though they had no explicit instructions to do so. Whether this is because a high protein diet does strange things to the brain centre that controls appetite/satiety or whether a diet of meat, meat and more meat is just too dull, I don’t know.
I do recall visiting some colleagues at UCSD about that time and in the restaurant, my host ordered an ‘Atkins burger’, which turned out to be a pat of meat wrapped up in some lettuce.
The one factor everyone forgets is that we animals have variability in our ability to process calories. I am overweight, i diet and excercise (seriously, I do), but I can gain weight back in a flash. my next door neighbor is taller than me and thing and he eats like a horse and stays thin. different diets and outcomes for different people!
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