Diet Study Wars

1. Every time I click on a link to read a "study" on diet, posted on a low carb page, it goes to a bogus article that can easily be confused for a legitimate one. The post titles also don’t end up matching what the article is about. None of their followers point this out to them. It's like they accept whatever they are told. If I say something, my comment is deleted or I get blocked, after I'm barraged with abusive responses. How can I protect myself from these lies? It's hard enough that I'm struggling with my weight and trying to find the right information on what to eat. I'm starting to feel like giving up as I'm overwhelmed.  

We are all affected by this. The foolery from the low carb community seeps into everything. I often have to decline multiple comments and posts due to links which are complete shim-sham, taken from low carb pages and groups. I always make sure that my readers aren't being duped because I want to help people navigate this insanity as best as possible. 

Be aware that low carb advocates are trying to sell books, website access, programs, supplements, etc. This is a business to them, like it is for other diet mongers. You have to be careful when you read these charlatan's tabloid-like pages because if you do not scrutinize the post and simply go by its title, you might end up believing wrong information. This can harm you in the end. 

There are a few studies that are constantly being passed around, with click bait titles, in low carb circles. The main ones are about "statins/cholesterol". For some reason, low carb scammers can't seem to get enough of this topic and their followers always fall for it. 

Every so often you will get a low carb weirdo posting a link with a click bait title such as - "Statins Proven To Be Useless For Treating Heart Disease!" or "Cholesterol Not Linked To Cardiovascular Risks!" They may post a link to a legitimate research paper on statins, from a reputable medical journal, in order to fool you into believing that their title is real. There are countless legitimate research papers published, in multiple medical journals, over the effectiveness of statins. You can find them easily online with just a quick Google search. Every single one of these studies came to the same result - Statins are beneficial for people with current heart disease but not due to their lowering of LDL. This basically means that no one knows exactly what causes the benefits from statins but there are benefits. This also doesn't mean that LDL is not implicated in heart disease. It just means that lowering LDL, for the vast majority of people, has no benefits for heart disease outcomes. But low carb advocates continuously pull this BS and their followers fall for it every single time. This is most likely because they are too lazy to read through the study themselves and simply take the "online doctor's" word for it. Don't let this be you. 

Do not be intimidated by studies. That's what these people are banking on. Studies are actually quite easy to understand, if you only focus on the facts, not the conclusions. After all, you can form your own. You don't even have to spend a lot of time reading through studies. Look at what was actually found, such as charts, graphs, percentages and numbers. If you only look at the hard data, you won't have to concern yourself with jargon. This doesn't mean that you can't still become familiar with the differences between relative vs absolute and correlation vs causation using a quick Google search anyway. After all, the more you know, the less you can be made a fool of. So the next time you see a link to cholesterol and statin studies, on a low carb page, you will already know it's all about BS. I wrote above what all these studies have found so far, so you don't have to go through every single one. 

The next BS that these low carb clowns try to pull is the popular title of - "Studies Have Shown That Low Carb Diets Are Effective For Treating Diabetes!". First, there have been no long term studies on the effects of low carb diets. That should not be surprising as there hasn't been any long term studies on any diet. Like I have said before, studying the effects of diets is practically impossible because long term studies are expensive and unethical. You cannot hold people prisoners in a camp, only eating the food you give them for years, in order to effectively study a diet. As far as how diets affect chronic disease is another red herring. There are too many variables between individuals which cause differing responses to diet and this is why no evidence has ever been presented regarding any diet's efficacy for "treating" any disease, aside from deficiencies. This means that all diet studies are BS. They cannot be used to make any scientifically based claim. The only thing they can be used for is book sales. 

But that doesn't mean that there hasn't been many scientifically inaccurate studies conducted on diets regardless. Remember, billions of dollars are available for all kinds of research and that money is up for grabs. The largest observational diet study to date is the 'The China–Cornell–Oxford Project', which you can Google for yourself. It compared the health consequences of diets rich in animal-based foods to diets rich in plant-based foods among people who were genetically similar. Many vegan/vegetarians jumped on this study and it spawned a series of diet books, 'The China Study' by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell amongst the most popular. Before you dish out about $20 bucks for it and read through 419 pages, I can tell you that the only interesting thing found was a correlation between low animal protein consumption and longevity. This is not surprising as restricting calories has always been found to be implicated in longevity and animal based foods contain more calories than plant based ones, absent of sugar and grains. Just remember that the study this book is based on is not scientifically accurate and consumption of animal proteins were not found to be harmful across the board. There have been smaller studies, here and there, examining this same age-old question of animal versus plant based diets and they have all come to the same result - junk food is bad (e.g. ultra-processed/man-made foods). That's the gist of thousands of diet studies in one sentence.  

'The NutriNet-Santé' study, which launched in 2009, is the first internet-based study of its kind. You can Google this study for more information. By the start of 2021, the team was regularly collecting data from 171,000 people, aged 15 years and older, making it the largest ongoing nutrition study in the world. It uses questionnaires to retrieve its data, so once again, it is not a truly scientifically accurate study. You can guess what it will find - that junk food is bad. 

But forget what these people, who are trying to sell books and striving to be the next celebrity doctor, believe. What do the actual experts think of all the information gathered by these "studies"? Well, Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association (AHA), said: "Diet alone is not going to be the reason that heart attacks are eliminated. Other key factors include physical activity, cholesterol, blood pressure and weight." Steven E. Nissen, a cardiologist, researcher and patient advocate, who was the chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, has stated that claims based on 'The China Study' are "unproven because there isn't data from rigorous clinical trials to support them". So before you think that conventional medicine is falling for the quackery, simply because it's not low carb, think again and actually research what their stance really is. 

So what are these low carb fools talking about? Well, they are banking on your ignorance over diet studies but they are also most likely referring to 3 popular studies which may have been mentioned in low carb circles. Let's go through them:

• The NUSI Studies. NUSI is an acronym for 'Nutrition Science Initiative'. Gary Taubes is the co-founder of this organization which has funded four projects — three in full and one in part — on the relationship between nutrition, obesity and metabolic diseases. You can find links to all four studies here. Can you guess the results? They have all shown that - Low carb diets have the same effect as any other diet on obesity/diabetes but they are certainly better than standard dietary advice. Their first study, the 'Energy Balance Consortium Pilot Study', actually showed that caloric restriction had a slightly greater benefit than low carb. This spawned an ongoing war over how the study was conducted and how the results were interpreted but in the end, it doesn't really matter. The study didn't show anything different than numerous other diet studies hadn't already, so there is no reason to believe that this one would have showed a major difference, even if it had been perfectly conducted and interpreted. Their last study, on fatty liver disease, showed the best outcome - A reduction of sugar reduced the incidents of fatty liver disease in adolescent boys. No surprise there. This had already been well established before in biology. Uncontrolled de-novo-lipogenesis depends on dietary sugar so when sugar is removed, the liver returns to a healthy state. It would be the same if alcohol was the culprit of the liver disease instead and it was removed. Then the alcoholic liver would return to a healthy state as well. Fatty liver disease and its causes are pretty well understood. After all, fatty liver is an actual disease. It is not a syndrome or an adaptation. 
• The Virta Studies. Virta conducted two studies - One on the effectiveness of a ketogenic protocol for the management of diabetes and the other on the effectiveness of a ketogenic protocol for the treatment of fatty liver disease in people with type II diabetes. Can you guess what happened here? The first one absolutely demonstrated that a ketogenic protocol could reduce diabetes medications and lower HbA1C, compared to the standard of care, but again so have other diets. In fact, if you read the entire study closely, you will see that the improvement was not enough to no longer be diabetic and only lasted up to one year. This is typical of all other treatments. The second study on fatty liver disease was more impressive as it showed you can reverse fatty liver disease with a ketogenic protocol but, as with the NUSI study, if you know the mechanism of fatty liver disease, this result is not surprising. It was expected. 
• The Intensive Dietary Management (IDM) Study. This one is not about low carb per say, but it is often thrown around in low carb circles anyway. This study published in the 'National Library of Medicine', with Dr. Fung as an author, tries to show that intermittent fasting can be an alternative to insulin in type II diabetics. Can you guess what happened with this one? The same thing as with the Virta study. Intermittent fasting reduced or eliminated the need for insulin in type II diabetics but they were still diabetic and their weight loss was dismal. Though the study was not conducted long term, I can guess that the effect waned within a year. The paper mentioned that caloric restriction is still an "important factor in the remission of diabetes" as demonstrated in the 'Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial'. So technically, naysayers can make the claim that intermittent fasting is a form of caloric restriction and that's where the minimal benefits came from. 

So there you have it folks. These studies have done nothing to prove that low carb diets, or fasting, are any better in efficacy than plain old caloric restriction. In fact, most of them inadvertently made the case for caloric restriction, rather than for themselves, as the 'Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial' actually showed remission of diabetes. Such a shame, because we know that low carb diets effect blood glucose regulation much more profoundly than caloric restriction, without reinforcing the adaption to starvation, and they can be followed for a much longer period of time. But in the end, the most important take away, from all of these studies, is that the restriction and/or elimination of junk food will always result in health benefits, across the board. They also show that when you go beyond the standard of care, you will see improvements. 

There is another study that is often forgotten and never mentioned but its results were much more impressive than any of the ones listed above. It was not a low carb diet study, nor was it comparing itself to any other "diet" or even to the standard of care. Its focus was only on one thing - sugar. Now there have been many studies on sugar which have all come to the same conclusion - sugar is not a factor in obesity or pathology, when its calories are restricted. Since the restriction of overall calories seems to be the confounder of every diet study, this study restricted none. This study simply focused on the effects of dietary sugar alone. 

'The Isocaloric Fructose Restriction Study' showed improvements in surrogate metabolic parameters in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome irrespective of weight change. This study was published in 'Obesity' and Dr. Robert Lustig is one of the authors. This study again showed that junk food is bad but this time it pinpointed that the sugar in junk food is particularly bad, irrespective of calories. This is the first study to show that restriction of calories was not a contributing factor to the health benefits seen. Only the elimination of sugar was. Now we are finally getting somewhere. Sugar disrupts proper blood glucose regulation and this study showed what happens when you drop the sugar and normalize blood glucose, even if you do nothing else. 

Another common fallacy in the low carb world is that the Virta study on ketogenic diets caused for the American Diabetes Association (ADA) to adopt the diet as a "treatment for diabetes". That's only half true. The ADA does not endorse any diet for the "treatment of diabetes" as they believe that "nutrition is not one-size-fits all". They only recommend a "healthy lifestyle". A "healthy lifestyle" includes a diet which is calorically restricted and low in ultra-processed foods. The Mediterranean Diet is still their most cited diet but you can make any diet "healthy" by simply watching calories. This means that when they included lower carbohydrate diets, to their "healthy" diet recommendation for healthcare providers, it was in the context of caloric restriction and only for the management of diabetes. "Management" being the operative word. Not remission. Not cure. Not treatment. The ADA only recognizes medications as actual treatments for diabetes. Diabetes is still considered chronic and progressive and no one, to date, has proven otherwise. So when you see a click bait title about the ADA or any title claiming they can "cure" or "reverse" diabetes, you know it's BS from the get-go. The only thing these low carb charlatans will be able to do for you is:

• Lower your blood glucose
• Lower your HbA1C
• Reduce or eliminate most medications
• Reduce or eliminate insulin injections
• Reduce your weight by some but never enough to not be obese

All of these things sound great, but they can be achieved with any diet. In about a years time, you will most likely start seeing a rise in blood glucose and HbA1C once again. Why? Because lowering blood glucose does not translate to proper blood glucose regulation. Until you are able to obtain proper and consistent blood glucose regulation, you will not affect insulin profoundly enough to regain sensitivity and you will not affect leptin profoundly enough to improve its signaling. As long as these things aren't corrected, you will forever be at diabetes's doorstep. All your doing is moving the goal post. I want people to actually think about that and understand what they are up against because these people will not help you. Reading BS, in order to feel hopeful, will not do you a bit of good. "Hope endureth forever in the human breast" but "the beatings shall continue until moral improves". 

The best thing to do is stay away from these low carb quacks but you can also use the tips below to better protect yourself when you do come across them:

• If a post title sounds too good to be true, it's probably a lie. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and posting a random link to one study is not enough. Click the link and see where it takes you. If it's going to a review or opinion website, it's total BS so don't bother reading it. Anyone can post an article on those sites, including myself. If the link goes to a legitimate study, published in a reputable medical journal, look at what was actually found in their hard data, such as charts, graphs, percentages and numbers. 
• Avoid any website claiming that it can "reverse" or "cure" diabetes. As of this post, there is no known cure for diabetes or obesity. Trust me, the cure for diabetes is not going to be posted on Facebook by a quack. It would be front page news in every paper and news channel around the world. It would be earth shattering and Nobel prizes will be handed out. 
• Check who the authors of the linked "study" are and if they have any conflicts of interest. A lot of these charlatans, not only link to review and opinion articles, disguising them as true "medical papers", but the authors are usually quacks from their low carb own circle. These quacks sell books and tickets to "conferences" so writing articles gets them exposure and makes them appear reputable. 
• Beware of scam websites. There are several low carb websites, which look like legitimate medical websites, run by these same people who are trying to sell you 💩. Unless the website is the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a medical organization (e.g. Cleveland Clinic, Harvard Health) or publication (e.g. Lancet, PubMed, British Medical Journal) ignore it. If they aren't published in any legitimate place, where it can be peer reviewed, it's BS. If it was only published on a "low carb website" or blog, it's BS.
• Ignore any speech given at a low carb event. There are many conferences and symposiums hosted by these scammers, which make unsuspecting people think that it's a real medical conference. It's not. These aren't the "greatest minds in medicine" coming together to give a speech. These are all a bunch of low-level sales people trying to lure you into buying their or their sponsor's snake oil. These people would never be invited to a legitimate medical conference. These events are just like the events hosted at hotels by funeral homes, trying to sell you plots with a free salad bar. The only difference is that you have to pay for a ticket in order to listen to a low carb sales pitch.
• Be wary of conspiracy theories. Many of these low carb websites make claims that the medical associations, pharmaceuticals and even your doctor have banned together to keep you diabetic. Only they have the cure you need but of course, they are being prevented from letting you know about it. Claims made about the ADA or any other medical association's stance on anything, should be double checked at that association's website. Do not just take the word of some fool online. If you need clarification, you can always contact the association directly with your questions about their recommendations or position. 
• Do not buy the junk these fools are trying to peddle. If you are curious about a book, wait for it to be free at the library. You can watch conferences for free online a few days after they occur. Salt, iodine and low carb/"keto" junk food are all a waste of money and not part of a true low carb diet plan. You can find supplements online at a fraction of the price these quacks sell it for. All of this junk will only make your wallet lean, while you remain obese. 

Do not be duped. Do not follow failed protocols. Metabolic syndrome/obesity/diabetes are time dependent conditions. You do not have time to waste on nonsense. You need to understand what's happening to you so you can properly address it in an effective manner.