In a major attack on the Atkins diet, major details are missing

Animal Attraction

Dr. Dean Ornish wants you to toss out your t-bone steak.

Why? Because a new study shows that your risk of dying by any cause is higher if you follow a low-carb, high-protein diet, such as the Atkins plan.

As you may know, Ornish is a diet “guru” who says the only way to good heart health is to follow HIS diet which allows no more than 10 percent protein.

In other words, it’s the anti-Atkins diet. With emphasis is on the “anti.” Because it’s not enough for Dr. Ornish to promote his diet and leave it at that. He’s a man on a mission to snatch that t-bone off your plate and replace it with a soy burger.

In a recent article titled “Atkins Diet Increases All-Cause Mortality,” Dr. Ornish discusses a “major study” from Harvard.

Thing is, he leaves out a couple little details that I’m sure he’d rather you not know about.

And by “little details” I mean “HUGE details.”

Hollywood ending

Once again, Harvard researchers went to the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study–a combined total of nearly 130,000 subjects. They crunched numbers from a food frequency questionnaire given to each subject, followed up with medical data–24 years of data on women and 20 years for the men.

Their conclusion: “A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low- carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.”

If Dr. Ornish had written this script, that’s probably the exact ending he would have dreamed up, as he and his dietary devotees walk off into the sunset (carefully stepping over the bodies of those poor saps who dared consume protein).

In his article, Dr. Ornish complains that many studies have misled the public. They show that the Atkins diet is good for weight loss and modifying heart disease risk factors, such as bumping up HDL. But all of that is pointless, he says, if you don’t include measures of disease and mortality.

Well, fair enough. But he doesn’t mention triglycerides. Studies have shown that triglycerides are often lowered by following Atkins. And the triglycerides factor is arguably much more important than HDL.

He also doesn’t note that this Harvard study isn’t clinical research. So, in other words, it’s not one of those “gold standard,” placebo-controlled studies that mainstreamers are always gushing about.

Nevertheless, he gushes about the results as if they provided The Last Word in the low-protein diet debate. But he doesn’t mention two very important details: 1) These subjects simply answered a few questions about their dietary habits at the beginning of the study–they weren’t necessarily following any strict diets, and 2) Researchers didn’t track dietary changes as the years went by.

Dr. Ornish also doesn’t mention that subjects whose diets were identified as animal-based and low-carb were found to be less likely to exercise compared to those who followed low-protein diets.

And finally, he doesn’t mention that subjects in the high- protein group were THREE TIMES more likely to be smokers.

Hmmm…do you suppose smoking and lack of exercise might contribute to all-cause mortality?

When your argument only holds water if you leave out major details, it’s obvious you’ve got no argument at all.

To Your Good Health,

Jenny Thompson

Sources:
“Atkins Diet Increases All-Cause Mortality” Dr. Dean Ornish, Huffington Post, 9/7/10, huffingtonpost.com
“Low-Carbohydrate Diets and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality” Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 153, No. 5, 9/7/10, annals.org