studies

Scientists Show That Bad Fake Coffee Drink Is Bad For You
04/01/2011 - 19:47

Scientists at the University of Guelph have determined that a fake coffee drink they invented in their lab is really bad for you. "Yeah, we wanted to see if coffee with cream was bad for you, but we wanted to have fun with things so instead of using cream we invented our own more interesting drink!" said researcher Marie-Soleil Beaudoin. She told her graduate students to just "have fun with things" and see what they could come up with using ingredients in their expensive lab. "It was a good opportunity for them to practice things like interesterification. I told them it was a little like Iron Chef!" The final drink her students came up with was a blend of palm stearine and soybean oil chemically interesterified to achieve a random distribution of fatty acids and a ratio of PUFA:SFA of 0.2. The grad students got to show off their culinary skills by making the final drink really tasty using Aspartame and commercially available toffee flavoring. The mixture was homogenized with an electric latte whip and served warm. "It looked really fancy" said graduate student Sarah Wells. The test subjects felt really crappy upon drinking this, but especially crappy when they mixed it with coffee from the hallway vending machine. Their blood sugar levels were 32% higher and they felt awful for several days. "I've had better cofffee from McDonalds" said test subject Robert Smith, a graduate student in philosophy who was paid $5 to drink the dreck. 

No, while I took some artistic license here, this is not a joke, this is a real drink that they fed to people and then used to blame saturated fat in meats... if you didn't read the sugar you might not realize that it wasn't exactly coffee with half & half. 

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Vegans: May be unhealthy, but that's not what this paper says
02/07/2011 - 18:31

 Vegans: many of them are smug self-satisfied jerks who believe they know everything about economics, nutrition, and environmental science. Even though experts in those fields realize we are just at the tip of the iceburg in our human knowledge. Yes, vegans, particularly on the internet, know their diet is sooo healthy and no one could possibly not do well on it and it saves cute puppies and you are a murderer if you eat bacon blah blah blah.

So you can tell I have no love lost for these folks. And when I saw this article title I got excited Being vegan could put heart health at risk: study. Then I realized there is a group of people who are even more insufferable: science reporters. Really, almost all of them suck and are a testament to our over-saturated journalism schools. As my brilliant science journalism professor once said "If you want to be a good science reporter, get a SCIENCE degree." 

So this isn't even a study. It's a boring review paper with lots of chemistry that obviously gave the reporter a headache.

OMG IT'S SCIENCE AHHHHHHH

It's called Chemistry behind Vegetarianism
by Duo Li from Zhejiang University and it's in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Oh yeah, it's not about vegans either. It's mostly about vegetarians, which isn't surprising since only mainly a of people are vegan in the world and there are probably less than 100 studies on these mostly-smug folks. 

And right at the beginning it says "Omnivores have a significantly higher cluster of cardiovascular risk factors compared with vegetarians." In the paper it postulates some reasons why a vegetarian might have a heart attack, mainly having to do with imbalance of omega-3 to omega-6 ratio and the ineffectiveness of vegan forms of omega-3 in foods (ALA is in vegan foods, but vegans can buy DHA supplements made from algae, who are not as cute as puppies). Only stupid vegans in fantasy raw vegan land think it's OK to be an unsupplemented vegan and this paper drives that point home. 

The homocysteine and platelet stuff may have to do with the omega imbalances in vegetarians. 

Collagen- and adenosine-50-diphosphate (ADP)-stimulated ex vivo whole blood platelet aggregation were significantly higher in both vegetarian and vegan groups than in both high- and moderate-meat-eater groups. The vegan group had a significantly higher mean platelet volume(MPV) than the high- andmoderatemeat-
eater and ovo-lacto vegetarian groups (35). Increased MPV in vegans suggests the presence of larger, activated platelets. Evidence from case control studies has indicated that an increased MPV is an independent risk factor for acute myocardial infarction (MI) (39) and for acute and/or nonacute cerebral ischemia (40).

That's an interesting study referenced and speaks to the fact that not all aspects of vegans have been studied. There are also no life-long multi-generational vegans. As science uncovers facts about how what your grandparents and parents ate affected you, this seems like a big blind spot. 

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More on that "low carb" study
09/14/2010 - 16:31

Aunt Maude still sending you links on that study that purported to show how terrible meaty diets are? Here are some great links for a takedown:

Denise Minger on Brand-Spankin’ New Study: Are Low-Carb Meat Eaters in Trouble?

PaleoHacks crowd-sourcing

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Studies about nothing
09/07/2010 - 13:53

If you read the media accounts you might think that this study is about Aktins or low-carb diets. But it's not. Because the people studied, as far as we know, weren't on such diets. Some of them just happened to eat lower carb and higher in meat, and the statisticians/idiots associated this with mortality. But were these people low carbers? For all we know they ate hot dogs from Safeway and their carb sources included twinkies and slurpies.

Here is a hint researchers: if you want to study a diet, have people actually do it. Don't try to evaluate a diet based on generalized data. Unfortunately these researchers are insulated by the fact that their data is behind a paywall.

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The China Joke
07/12/2010 - 13:21

While I was gone, apparently The China Study received some belated smackdown. I've personally never paid much attention to that book. I took several advanced statistics classes for my degree and an epidemiology class. If I wanted to base my diet on that flawed methodology, I might be more interested. But you can hash and rehash data and it won't change the fact that epidemiology (like my own science, economics) has been responsible for crap conclusions that have not bared out in the real world. I don't think economics or epidemiology are bad and in fact I'm quite interested in them, but they are rough tools that I'm not going to use them to manage my life.

As Kurt Harris said:

This is all just epidemiology, and epidemiology is bogus. Now, I don't mean it has absolutely no value. It is good for hypothesis generation. It is almost worthless for finding the truth. It is especially worthless the way it is used by hacks like Campbell who are simply trying to sell people a book that tells them what they want to hear.

You can run all kind of analytics on that China data and maybe find some interesting hypotheses to test, but then you have to worry about the data itself. I'm not sure rural Chinese people from the 80s have much to tell us about what to eat in America now. As Denise pointed out, there are pathogens present in rural China that aren't exactly common in Brooklyn, NY.

While Denise's post is certainly very interesting, I'm alarmed that she is now working with a vegan epidemiologist, but who also is a fruit-based raw vegan. While there are several academics who have formulated scientific vegan nutrition, no conventional science supports the fruit-base raw vegan diet- it's pure quackery and lately its proponents have unfortunately been trolling paleo blogs.

Evolutionary fitness is not about epidemiology- it's applied evolutionary theory. I'll be reviewing some books in the next month about that science, but needless to say, I think it's a far better groundwork for living as a human.

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Paleolithic Diet in Medical Nutrition
01/09/2010 - 19:01

 

http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/
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