Chatter, chatter and more chatter

Crowd Noise

Now we know how much it costs to build a Tower of Babel: around $415 million.

That’s the approximate cost of the low-fat diet study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The results: chatter, chatter and more chatter .

What it was

You may have heard that the study was about heart disease. That’s just chatter. The title of the study reveals the basics: “Low-Fat Dietary Pattern and Risk of Invasive Breast Cancer.”

Now I’m all for studying potential methods of breast cancer prevention, but to devote hundreds of millions of dollars to this study was like betting the farm that the mainstream’s beloved low-fat diet would win big on one roll of the dice. Turns out, it was a long shot that didn’t pay off. Sure, there’s probably a link between dietary choices and breast cancer risk, but at best, diet is only going to be one piece of the puzzle.

The study was conducted by the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) of the National Institutes of Health (yep – our tax dollars at work). Nearly 49,000 postmenopausal women participated. For a period of about eight years, more than 19,500 of the women agreed to cut their fat intake to no more than 20 percent. They were also asked to eat six servings of grain and five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

The results: the diet had virtually no effect on breast cancer. More than 29,000 subjects ate whatever they wanted for eight years, and the rate of invasive breast cancer was nearly the same in both groups.

And this is where the chatter begins to escalate into a roar.

Chit chat

The WHI team must have felt pretty confident going in. After all, the study was launched in 1993, back in the days when the mainstream considered “low-fat” to be the gold standard diet.

So, what went wrong? According to the Associated Press, researchers offered this speculative chatter:

• The women in the intervention portion of the study may have started this “healthy” diet too late in life to have an effect
• Many of the women didn’t actually stick to the diet as well as they should have
• Most of them remained overweight, compromising positive effects of the diet

That last item is my favorite. They put nearly 20,000 women on a low-fat diet for eight years and most of them remained overweight? Is it just me, or is that the REAL headline that should have come out of this study?

I asked HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., for his take on the study. He called it “silly” and added: “A low-fat diet MUST, by definition, be high carb. All you get in a diet are fats, proteins, and carbs, and most proteins are attached to fats, so there just isn’t much else to eat. Low-fat diets also taste awful, so sugar, refined salt (and often flavor enhancers like MSG) have to be added. High carb intake is what’s made us the fattest, unhealthiest country of nearly all the ‘civilized’ nations, in spite of our ‘best medical system in the world’!”

If only

I mentioned above that the study wasn’t focused on heart disease. But the incidence of heart disease was also monitored, as were data on cardiovascular disease, stroke and colorectal cancer. The low-fat diet provided no significant risk reduction for any of these conditions.

But haven’t we heard for YEARS now that low-fat diets are heart healthy? Here’s some chatter offered up to NutraIngredients from a Johns Hopkins researcher: The diet used in the study didn’t include reduced salt and increased intake of potassium – two measures that (according to the American Heart Association) lower blood pressure and help lower cardiovascular disease risk. Other researchers suggest that if the intervention diet had been based on the Mediterranean diet, the study might have produced beneficial results.

Would any of these adjustments really have made a significant difference? I doubt it, but I’d vote for ABC to do an Extreme Makeover: NIH Health Study edition. At least that way they could get sponsors to pay for it the second time around.

Sources:
“Low-Fat Dietary Pattern and Risk of Invasive Breast Cancer” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 295, No. 6, 2/8/06, jama.ama-assn.org
“Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds” Gina Kolata, The New York Times, 2/8/06, nytimes.com
“Eating Less Fat Offers Little Disease Protection” The Associated Press, 2/7/06, msnbc.msn.com
“Low Fat Diet ‘Has No Effect on Heart Risk'” NutraIngredients, 2/8/06, nutraingredients.com