The more I read about ‘health’ research, the more sceptical I am of any edict about diet or lifestyle. It starts by doubting the headlines (housework prevents cancer), then you read the articles and get sceptical of science journalism. So far you’re only blaming the messengers. But then you go on the internet and find the articles the press-releases are based on, and they don’t prove anything. It’s when you read the articles in their entirety, and see badly designed study after badly designed study, which don’t prove anything, despite what their authors claim. Theoretically journal articles are supposed to be refereed to ensure that they actually prove what they say they prove. As articles that clearly don’t prove what their authors claim are allowed through this process, why do we believe any of it?
And yet, I was still surprised to read an article arguing that a diet high in saturated fat did not make people more prone to heard disease.
Malcolm Kendrick appears to be making two claims: that there’s no evidence that a diet high in saturated fat causes elevated cholesterol, and that there’s no proof that elevated cholesterol levels leads to an increase risk of heart disease, or death. Read the article yourself – I’m sure you’ll hear more about it – he’s got a book coming out (the parts about cholesterol lowering drugs are particularly interesting).
I’m not saying I believe Malcolm Kendrick – necessarily. In fact I make it a matter of principle to disbelieve everything in the Daily Mail. There’s some really bad logic in the article (almost all foods on saturated fats were rationed in the UK during and post-war, but the level of heart-disease doubled – this is supposed to be evidence that there is no link between heart disease and saturated fats. Unless there was more than one risk factor for heart disease). I wouldn’t be surprised of Dr Kendrick, or others doing this research had some connection with the meat and dairy industry (if you were part of the meat industry wouldn’t you pay him?)
But at this point everyone is being paid by someone. Food is manufactured for a profit, as is food advice. Malcolm Kendrick gives the examples of the 9 memeber panel that decided to lower the recommended cholesterol level – 8 had ties to the pharmaceutical compnaies that produce cholesterol lowering drugs.
The ridiculous nature of nutritional advice can be seen when the anti-carb people fight the anti-fat people. Each side is very good at demonstrating why it’s a bad idea to demosing an entire food-group, but the argument behind this isn’t that demonising a food group is probably a bad idea, but that we need to eliminate the right food group (and I’m sure the anti-carb people are funded by industries that are high fat, and vice versa).
We have a puritanical attitude towards food. The idea that virtue will be rewarded, and that virtue is the elimination of pleasure, and the quest towards perfection, describe most mainstream conversation about food (and as a political activist I must point out far too much non-mainstream discussion as well). This fits in well with the needs of our food producers (which is for us to buy their products, in case you were wondering). Meat producers can make you feel virtuous when people are worrying about carbohyrate, bread produceers when people are worrying about fat. The people who make chocolate, donuts, and deep fried potatoes know that these ideas of sin and virtue serve their intersts as much as anyone else’s – because it’s only within that context that people can transgress by eating.
At this stage willing to believe that it’s dangerous to smoke, and eat arsenic – but it appears that we’ve got to take everything else of faith. Personally I’ve got other things I’d rather spend energy believing in.
Pingback: Lung cancer
As articles that clearly don’t prove what their authors claim are allowed through this process, why do we believe any of it?
You shouldn’t. You should read the articles and evaluate their merits and flaws. Nonetheless, you should see some of the ones that don’t get through!
I’m also skeptical of this article because I can’t find the article in Lancet the author claims is his primary source for the claims he is making about cholesterol. It could be that I just missed it one way or another, of course. If anyone has seen the Lancet article under discussion I’d appreciate a link to it.
It is actually safe to eat arsenic, as long as you don’t eat too much. And while a two-pack a day habit increases risk of lung cancer, not everyone who smokes will develop lung cancer. Doctors are as prone as anyone else to look for simple cures and are as likely as anyone else to misread correlation as causation. For more on the failure to demonstrate that high cholesterol causes heart attack, see junkfood science. She covers a lot of the BS on the childhood obesity epidemic, too.
I have no scientific evidence for anything I’m about to say, so you shouldn’t believe a word of it.
However… I gotta think that this is all related somehow to the Judeo-Christian paradigm. Gluttony=overeating=sin, overeating makes you fat, so fat=sinful=bad. Even assuming that overeating or self-indulgence in general is sinful, note the backward logic here.
It’s true that eating more calories while getting the same amount of exercise will make you put on weight, as I’ve proven to myself recently. It’s also true that by an irony of fate we’ve gotten to a point where fat, sugar and salt, three things we need in smallish amounts to survive that are very hard to come by in a state of nature and that we’re therefore hard-wired to crave, are now cheaper and easier to find than, say, fresh vegetables. Whether it’s true that putting on weight is a bad thing for either your body or your soul is a whole different question. (Note that I didn’t even say that fresh vegetables are better for you than sugar or fat, just that eating the former won’t make you fatter, and eating the latter will, holding exercise constant, of course.)
(C.S. Lewis has a bit in one of his books about how gluttony is about not how much you eat but how determined you are to eat what you want and how much of a pain in the ass you make of yourself to get it. By this standard someone who will eat only organic vegan food and who will make you go 20 miles out of your way to have lunch at the only restaurant meeting their standards and quiz the server exhaustively about everything on the menu, then send everything back twice, is more of a glutton than someone who eats six double cheeseburgers a day but leaves the rest of the world alone. But I digress.)
There is a lot of good work done — the problem is that science reporters have minimal scientific backgrounds. Consequently, they don’t really know where to look or what questions should be asked.
When browsing through articles, look at the authors’ credentials. If they have a MD/MPH or PhD/MPH combo, it’s far more likely to be methodologically rigorous than if it’s just a run of the mill MD. (Contrary to popular opinion, most MDs have mediocre stats skills.) Why? Because statistics-track MPHs are really a parasitic degree marrying statistical theory with statistical practice. More importantly, the good ones self-consciously teach students how to overcome their biases (e.g., fat = lazy) and how to formulate key questions.
Cardiology isn’t my specialty, but I think he takes his conclusions a few steps too far.
Kaethe, you must have linked to the wrong article. That one didn’t say anything about cholesterol.
But it’s interesting that she compares thin, poor Australian with poor healthcare to wealthy, heavier Australians with better healthcare and concludes that obesity doesn’t impact life span because the latter group lives longer. It couldn’t possibly be that those other factors might also impact lifespan!
Maybe someday she’ll stumble on the concept of controlling for factors when trying to determine an effect. Until then, it’s more of the same old schtick.
Lu: My hypothesis is that gluttony used to be a big-time sin when food was scarce and transportation unreliable so that there were famines periodically. In a famine, a glutton is taking food away from another person who might starve as a result. Also remember that until recently gluttony was a rich person’s sin. For whatever that helps.
Of course you’re right, Dianne, but I think gluttony also has to do with overindulging the senses. In any case, I think because of some internalized Puritan idea that self-denial=virtue and vice versa, we tend to associate being fat with lack of self-control, laziness, uncleanliness (“fat slob”), bad taste, and stupidity. When I drag all of this out into the light and look at it I’m blown away. I have been for much of my life naturally thin, able to eat anything without gaining weight (those days are gone). It’s amazing how easy it is to equate good luck with inherent virtue, and bad luck with sin.
But then you go on the internet and find the articles the press-releases are based on, and they don’t prove anything.
A very common problem with science reporting in general, whether you’re talking about food/nutrition/obesity, cancer, sexual orientation and/or behavior, climate, etc., etc. Someone comes out with a study whose scope and conclusions are very constrained and limited, and the resultant news story leads with “A recent study shows ‘x’ proves/causes ‘y'”. I’ve gotten to the point that I just simply don’t believe any MSM story regarding a scientific study, regardless of whose point it purportedly proves.
Contrary to popular opinion, most MDs have mediocre stats skills.
I didn’t realize that was popular opinion. I got my master’s at a medical school and took courses with the medical students. From what I could see, if you gave them 1 and 1 it was a coin flip whether or not they came up with 2. I sure as hell hope the nurses are checking their math when they do dosage calculations.
I see it a lot on altie sites; it’s essentially “I can’t understand the studies, and/or some of them are wrong or confusing, so I’ll just believe what I believe, never mind things like science and evidence.”
Yes, of course… some studies are poorly constructed. Many reporters do a poor job describing them accurately. Science is imperfect; this is expected and unfortunate.
What is also unfortunate is that some folks take this confusion and imperfection and use it to try to disprove the general effectiveness of the scientific process. See, e.g., the ID movement, or the homeopathy movement, or… (insert your favorite example here).
So this:
is the wrong solutino. the answer to confusion isn’t faith in random facts. the answer is to pay better attention to what we know, and don’t know.
Actually, there is decades of good research (when examined carefully) disproving the myth that fat or high cholesterol causes heart disease. There is an extensive body of work by the researchers and doctors with the International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics. Dr. Kendrick’s in that UK article, by the way, has written regular columns for many years in several publications and is very well known for really tearing the bad science apart.
Pollan’s _The Omnivore’s Dilemna_ suggests that people normally chose what they eat based on custom and pleasure (and, of course, availability). I don’t think he puts it quite this way, but Americans have drastically weakened custom and don’t trust pleasure, so we’re incredibly subject to food fads.
I remember living above a nutritionist while in London. She had been working up in Scotland for several years and was pretty appalled at some of the things in the diet:
…deep-fried Yorkie bars?
I think our major problem is the US isn’t set up for activity during the day. Japan and Europe are better because in most places you end up walking much more. Walk a lot, drink good wine, and eat what you please. Would probably stay away from the trans-fats, though.
(One reason to do one’s own cooking from scratch–knowing what goes in there. I use a heck of a lot of olive oil and it doesn’t seem to have killed me yet.)
Your post reminded me of a post I saw on another blog about how folks are just now discovering (!!) that there *may* be bias in food studies funded by food companies. Shocking, I know. (the link to the article is inside my link) However, it’s not a huge surprise to me. There’s always a “study” that comes out whnever there’s a new food fad, and the study usually supports it. Like all the studies that backed up the Atkins craziness.
I second the opinions here that throwing one’s hands up in frustration is not the solution to being confused by food research. Science reporting could be a lot better, but the general public being statistically literate would also help.
To this end, I think what the Public Library of Science is trying to do will change science reporting in the long run. It will give the public a chance to look at the actual research articles (which is now usually impossible w/out a university affiliation) and it will force scientists (to an extent) to make their papers more clear so they can be understood by non-scientists. Cutting out the middle man, so to speak.
(I think the junkfood scientist does readers a disservice by not presenting more of the original articles, not analyzing the studies’ methods in more detail, not explaining how researchers drew their conclusions, and essentially ignoring the game of Telephone played when you go from an academic research article to a public information office to a science journalist to the public.)
And while a two-pack a day habit increases risk of lung cancer, not everyone who smokes will develop lung cancer.
No, lots of people who smoke will develop emphysema, COPD, fibrosis or a host of other diseases without getting lung cancer. It’s not a matter of “lung cancer” vs “nothing”.
Discovery just had a very good article on the science of fat, pointing out that fat is now considered an organ of the body, like skin, and one we don’t really understand…there are different types and not all of them are equally dangerous, and of course, all have some beneficial purpose normally.
On top of that, I’ve read really interesting things here and there about how much disease appears to be linked to the presence of certain bacteria…including heart disease. People have this simplistic idea that you eat fat and goes right to your arteries, when that’s not what arterial plaque is, and we’re not entirely sure what causes it.
My suspicions still lie with transfats, high fructose corn syrup, stress, and hormone disruptors from chemical processes. I suspect it’s the stuff they feed the chickens and cook the chickens in, not the chicken skin itself, that will hurt you if you eat KFC.
What’s a Yorkie bar?
Damn right there’s something else besides lung cancer you can get from smoking, and I see it every time I visit my father with his oxygen tube in his nose, barely able to do anything else besides walk around his apartment without running out of breath.
To quote Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, is this National Forgot How to Google Month?
Yorkie bar