For anyone waiting for Wheat Post 2, sorry—this isn’t it. But it’s coming! Pinky swear!
News:
1. Killin’ la vida China Study. The fabulous Jimmy Moore recently invited me to be on The Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Show, which—if you’re not yet aware—is a podcast-goldmine not only for low carbers, but for anyone interested in health. You can listen to my interview with him here. Despite recording at 8 AM, it was a blast—thanks, Jimmy!
2. “The China Study” dies another death. Up until recently, my biggest beef with Campbell’s casein research was his attempt to extrapolate casein’s effects to all forms of animal protein, despite demonstrating that plant proteins can behave the same way. But now a bigger, stronger, beefier beef has hoofed its way into the picture. Sherlock Holmes Chris Masterjohn did some sleuthing and made some very interesting discoveries about what the casein research really showed. If you haven’t read this article yet, please do so. Now.
3. Campbell speaketh. If you’re going through Campbell withdrawal, fear not: He just published a new article over on The Huffington Post called “Low Fat Diets are Grossly Misrepresented.” You can probably guess what it’s about from the title.
I actually agree with one of the article’s implications, which is that not all “low fat” diets are actually low fat, especially in the case of clinical studies—kind of like we saw with that recent low-carb flapdoodle. A diet with 30% fat isn’t representative of Ornish any more than a diet with 30% carbohydrates is representative of Atkins, but the “low fat” label is often used by researchers to misleadingly describe a moderate fat intake.
Although my last blog post criticized the inaccurate titling of a not-very-low-carb study, the same could be said of many so-called low-fat studies. No matter what side of the diet fence you’re on, from a scientific standpoint, it’s important to be equally critical of all research and not automatically assume studies are well-designed just because their results sound good.
4. Ned Kock does heart disease. A couple weeks ago, Ned did some number-crunching on the China Study II data in relation to heart disease mortality, cholesterol, wheat, and rice. Check out his posts The China Study II: Cholesterol seems to protect against cardiovascular disease and The China Study II: Wheat flour, rice, and cardiovascular disease.
(Big apologies to those who left comments on the last briefly-existent post! I decided to delete some stuff I wrote about my “suspicious connection” to the Weston A. Price Foundation because it came off sounding snarkier than intended, but then I ended up trashing the whole thing so I could post this with a different URL.)
A more substantial wheat entry is comin’ up next.
