Hold the Lard!

The Atkins Diet still doesn't work.

By Michael Fumento

Issue settled. The Atkins Diet—the famous high-fat, low-carb regime that lets dieters load up on pork rinds and Scrapple as long as they avoid potatoes and Wheaties—works. The American Heart Association has been wrong all along, as has essentially the entirely American medical establishment. Not only is gorging on fat the key to becoming thin, it's heart-healthy to boot. So say the headlines:
• "High Fat, Low Carb Diet May Finally Be Getting Its Due" (CNN)
• "Fats Win Latest Round in Diet War" (Chicago Tribune)
• "Low-carb Atkins Diet Beats Low-Fat American Heart Association Plan in Head-To-Head Comparison" (CNBC)
• "High-Fat Diet Shows Promise in Study" (AP)
• "Doctors Eat Crow on Banning Celebrity Diet" (The Australian)

The public responded predictably to the pro-Atkins results of an Atkins-funded study last month. Sales of Dr. Robert Atkins' diet book skyrocketed over 900 percent on Amazon.com the day the news broke. Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution has now sold over 10 million copies; according to one Atkins stooge, more than 20 million people have signed on for the diet. Celebrities ranging from callipygian lovelies Jennifer Lopez and Minnie Driver to formerly porky Spice Girl Geri Halliwell to one-man body mass rollercoaster Matthew Perry have reportedly taken the Atkins plan straight to the scales.

And they've all been sold one greasy fat bill of goods.

There are two issues here. One is the effect of the Atkins diet on weight loss. The other is its effect on cholesterol and triglycerides, a group of fatty compounds that circulate in the bloodstream and are stored in the fat tissue.

In the study in question, Dr. Eric Westman of the Duke University Medical Center looked at both. He followed two groups of 60 dieters each, one on a high carbohydrate diet and one on the high-fat, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet. He reported that the Atkins group lost twice as much weight during the six-month study period as did the high-carb group. But this is both unsurprising and meaningless.

Gary Foster of the University of Pennsylvania co-authored a study conducted in virtually the same manner as Westman's. Foster, whose work will soon appear in a major medical journal, provides a simple explanation for the Atkins weight loss. The regimen "gives people a framework to eat fewer calories, since most of the choices in this culture are carbohydrate driven," he says. "Over time people eat fewer calories."

Randy Seeley of the University of Cincinnati co-authored yet another "sister study" with similar results. His explanation is the same as Foster's. Ultimately, Atkins is nothing more than a low-calorie diet in disguise.

In any event, the main issue with any diet—be it Atkins, popcorn, or jelly bean—isn't whether people can lose weight in the short-term but rather whether they can stick to the regimen and keep the pounds off not for just half a year but essentially forever. Yet completely lost in the media mania was that among the 60 Atkins dieters in the Westman group analyzed for weight loss, the dropout rate was 43 percent.

Thus almost half the Atkins cohort couldn't stay with the steak and bacon routine for even six months. By comparison, only 25 percent of the high-carb eaters dropped out.

Moreover, it's generally accepted that drop-out rates anywhere near this level completely invalidate a study because you don't know how all those drop-outs would have affected the result. Maybe those Atkins dieters were quitting not only because of carbohydrate cravings but also because they weren't losing weight or losing it fast enough to satisfy them.

Why would Westman's interpretation be so different from those of Foster and Seeley? It may help to know not only that this particular study was paid for by the Atkins Center, but that it's part of a long-term funding arrangement.

Analyses such as one published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in May 2000 have shown that funding sources do in fact influence study results and the interpretations (or "spin" if you will) of those results. "When the boundaries between industry and academic medicine become as blurred as they are now, the business goals of industry influence the mission of medical schools in multiple ways," declared an accompanying NEJM editorial.

Westman's interpretation, based on his handful of subjects observed over a mere six months, also directly contradicts three decades of randomized controlled studies published in peer-reviewed journals. A review of over 200 of these published last year in a major medical journal concluded bluntly: "The BMIs [a surrogate measure of weight] were significantly lower for men and women on the high carbohydrate diet; the highest BMIs were noted for those on a low carbohydrate diet."

But what about the blood findings? Wasn't it a real shocker that Atkins dieters consuming heavy amounts of fat saw their HDL ("good cholesterol") levels increase by 11 percent while harmful triglycerides fell 49 percent? (LDL or "bad cholesterol" levels remained the same.)

No.

"Often just losing weight alone will cause improvement in triglyceride and cholesterol levels," the president of the American Heart Association Dr. Robert Bonow told me. Since the Atkins dieters did lose more weight than those on the high-carb diet, it only stands to reason that by comparison their blood levels would also improve more.

Says Seeley, Westman's "weight loss data look just like ours and my argument is that the weight loss accounts for the beneficial effects."

Westman told me that he doesn't believe this to be the case, because another study, in the July 2002 Journal of Nutrition, claims to have found a similar improvement on an Atkins-type diet regardless of weight loss. But the same researchers, using the same group of dieters, published another study at the same time reporting that the Atkins dieters lost an average of 7.5 pounds over a six-week period. So again, blood fat levels merely fell with body fat levels.

Ultimately this fat-fest over a single study shows nothing more than the media's amazing ability to pick out and flaunt a will o' the wisp—even to the point that one American network repeatedly used on-the-air interviews from a representative of the Atkins Institute to interpret a study paid for by the Atkins Institute!

Why? Our increasingly obese population is desperate for some magical formula to avoid the physiological law that body fat is determined by calories in and calories out. The media tried to fill the need, but ultimately failed the public. "It just makes people confused and frustrated," an exasperated Seeley said. Yes, and fatter by the day.


Michael Fumento is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and author of The Fat of the Land (Viking, 1997). His next book, BioEvolution: How Biotechnology is Changing Our World, will be published by Encounter Books in the spring.

http://www.reason.com/hod/mf120502.shtml

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Fumento is a lawyer with lobbyist think tank, the Hudson Institute. It's interesting to see how the focus on finance in one study should invalidate other studies, even those funded by the AHA itself. What is more interesting, is that a different approch, anti low-fat would be taken, when selling his book "Fat of the Land". This really underscores the point Gary Taube made, about leaving the health direction to be decided by lawyers! Here an article he previously wrote:

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The Feds' fib about low-fat


Michael Fumento

Just a week ago, I sat at an outdoor cafe in Budapest watching the thin people. Scores would walk by before I would see so much as a small potbelly or a set of thick thighs. Now I'm back in the Land of the Fat, Home of the Broad. America is already the fattest nation on Earth, yet we grow wider by the year.

What has gotten into us?

There's no one explanation for the obesity epidemic, but much of it can be laid at the feet of the low-fat myth spread by the food industry, diet-book authors and — worst of all — our own trusted government health officials.

Back in 1990, a government report by the Food and Drug Administration (along with a coalition of 38 federal agencies and health organizations) instructed consumers to reduce the fat in their diets to 30 percent or less of total calories.

The report was actually aimed at lowering cholesterol levels and preventing heart disease, though, even here, it was grossly oversimplistic. After all, some types of fats are far worse for the heart than others, and fish oil actually appears beneficial.

Giving a target percentage also ignores simple math. A diet of 3,000 calories including 30 percent fat provides more fat than one of 2,000 calories including 40 percent fat.

But the real problem came when health agencies and others seized upon it as a way of reining in the nation's growing obesity problem. Get down to the 30 percent threshold and you will achieve nirvana and thinness, we were told.

And retold and retold. It's even proclaimed by every single FDA-mandated food label, where it indicates what percentage of our "daily value" the fat in the product provides.

Yet the science has always said that maintaining a healthful body weight is no more complex or magical than simply balancing calories burned vs. calories consumed, regardless of the source.

A slew of studies have looked precisely at this issue, providing subjects limited-calorie diets with varying amounts of fat, protein and carbohydrates. Most have found that persons eating a high-fat diet lost as much body fat as, or more than, those on a low-fat one.

One such, at New York's Rockefeller University, reported back in 1992, fed all subjects liquid formulas with the percentage of fat ranging from zero all the way up to 70 percent of total calories. The result? "A calorie is a calorie," said the primary researcher.

Dietary data from countries around the world also show no correlation between fat consumption and obesity levels — except that Americans get far fewer of their calories from fat than do countries where people look like stick figures compared with us. Hungarian cuisine, incidentally, is notoriously fatty.

Finally, historical U.S. consumption data show that we now get a considerably smaller percentage of our calories from fat than we did not so long ago – when we were as thin as those Hungarians.

Since 1977-78, fat as a percentage of our diets has dropped by over 17 percent, even as obesity has increased by over 25 percent. The fewer calories we've taken in from fat, the fatter we've become.

"The studies are clear," Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, told me. "As far as body fat goes, it doesn't make any difference where your calories come from."

Suddenly, this is all being treated as new. Yet it was all discussed in my 1997 book, "The Fat of the Land."

Nor should it be a surprise that this has wreaked havoc on our eating habits.

A joint Food Marketing Institute and Prevention magazine survey in 1996 found that 72 percent of those polled made decisions to buy food based on the fat content listed on the FDA's label, while only 9 percent treated calories the same way.

Spurred by the government's "Demon Fat" campaign, foodmakers began pumping out products low in fat but packed with sugar and calories. Yet controlled studies support the common-sense assumption that when told what they're eating is low in fat, people become pigs. They swap small amounts of satisfying fat for mountains of calories that leave them feeling empty.

None of this is to say the government should have no role in public health, including lifestyle issues. But early successes against contagious illnesses and smoking have lately been replaced by questionable crusades against asbestos, passive smoking and animal carcinogens.

The government's AIDS campaign, which from the beginning targeted those least at risk while largely ignoring those truly at risk, has tragic parallels to the Demon Fat campaign.

If our health officials truly want to help us, they must stick to the science. And they must never forget Hippocrates' admonition: "First, do no harm."

Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary...05-12959786.htm