Most nutrition science is junk. See the recent headline scoring Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health study that according to the ideologically captured researchers supported the assertion that red meat consumption was linked to diabetes mellitus. There are so many problems with these spin-off studies that come from large data sources; the study in question comes from data collected during the Nurses Health Study wherein the dietary components were collected via survey every two to four years. In plain language that means that once in a blue moon, the participants were sent an enormously long questionnaire that asked them to recall how often they had eaten a particular item over the previous time period. If you think that sounds like a pretty shonky method of collecting data, you’d be right. The public can actually access all the questionnaires used during the Nurses Health Study here where it becomes clear to even the village idiot that any data produced from a survey that asks people to estimate “how often on average you have used the specified amount during the past year” produces data that is fit for the toilet only. I can barely remember what I ate yesterday let alone estimate an entire years worth of nutrition well after the fact.
It’s instructive to download one of the questionnaires and scroll down to Question 23 where the meat – pardon the pun – of the “meat causes diabetes” hypothesis comes from and note the categories that are included. Cod/halibut/haddock is in the same category as stew, casserole, lasagna or frozen dinner. Even ideologues can probably admit that a piece of grilled cod has nothing in common with a processed dinner bought from a supermarket freezer.
I haven’t even touched on the fallacy of over-analysing data like the Nurses Health Study where statistical significance is routinely defined as a p value of 0.05. Even though every basic statistics student understands that a p value of 0.05 means that 5 times out of a hundred the result achieved which confirms your hypothesis is actually false. The data from Nurses Health Study has featured in literally hundreds if not thousands of studies which means that many of the studies claiming significant support for the tested hypothesis are simply wrong. This sort of corruption of the intent of statistics should be outlawed but has unfortunately become more and more common.
Do you have a budgie, gerbil or guinea pig? If so, take all publications resulting from the Nurses Health Study or any other long questionnaire study and use the pages to line the bottom of the cage and move on.
This study, however, is really interesting. Now, the usual caveats apply, small study (only 10 participants), all women, etc. but, unlike the “meat causes diabetes” study, the hypothesis behind this study is methodogically and biologically sound. You should read the study, although it could be a challenging read for those without a medical background (remember challenge is good!), but the basic argument is that nutritional ketosis (defined in the study) is associated with anti-aging, anti-disease factors. In the study, a 21 day reversal of nutritional ketosis led to an increase in body weight, fat mass, insulin secretion and various pro-inflammatory blood measures. A return to nutritional ketosis over 21 days reversed these changes.
This has implications not only for the development of cardiovascular disease and Alzheimers Disease (probably a manifestation of metabolic dysfunction) but also the development of various forms of cancer. Given that progress in treating these major health disorders (CVD, AD, cancer) has advanced remarkably little in the last several decades, prevention is absolutely much more important than treatment (there is no cure). I won’t say that maintaining nutritional ketosis is easy in the modern world, and it’s certainly made more difficult by the fact that well-meaning but ultimately misguided health experts continuously talk about eating more grains and fruits and less nutrient dense animal flesh, but if you simply turn Nutrition Australia’s Healthy Eating Pyramid upside down, you’ll be on the right track.
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