"Default User" > wrote in message
...
> Dan Abel wrote:
>
> > For my second opinion, I think that whether a diet works well for a
person
> > depends more on psychology than anything else. If Atkins or some
> > variation works well for you, that's great. That doesn't mean it will
> > work well for someone else.
>
>
> I agree with that strongly. The business with medical studies is
> extremely tricky. Basically what they do is amass reams of anecdotal
> evidence and sort through looking for correlations. That's because it's
> difficult to perform controlled experiments on people. You can't get
> groups of children, feed them different diets over a span of years, and
> see which group has the higher incidence of heart disease. They aren't
> lab animals. You can do that with medication to a certain extent, but
> not so much with diet. You can have the short term studies, "eat oatmeal
> and your cholesterol goes down or maybe it doesn't."
>

Medical studies are *not* anecdotal. You are misusing the word. Many do in
fact use post-hoc analysis where you do not tell people what to eat but
rather ask them to keep track of what they eat and then relate that to later
measures of health.

> Studies in the past seemed to show high fat diets to be deterimental to
> health. Newer studies seem to show high carbs may be. Does that mean the
> old studies were wrong? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps these are wrong.
> Perhaps these are right. Latching on to any study and saying, "OK, we
> have the truth now!" is probably misguided at best.
>

Most people overlook the fact that the studies that showed high-fat diets to
be unhealth did not limit carbs in any way. There's a lot of evidence that
the amount of carbs you eat has a big effect on what your body does with the
fats in your diet and whether or not they impact your health.

The Atkins diet is often misrepresented as "eat all you want of any high-fat
food." This is not true. Neither is the claim that Atkins is a low-vegetable
diet. Atkins includes tons of vegetables with a few high-carb ones
(potatoes, carrots, corn, for example) restricted. Atkins does not claim to
be the only effective diet. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who have
the "fat is bad" mantra permanently embedded in their small brains that they
refuse to face the evidence.


--
Peter Aitken

Remove the crap from my email address before using.


--
Peter Aitken

Remove the crap from my email address before using.