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Old February 20th, 2006, 07:29 AM posted to sci.med.nutrition,alt.support.diet.low-fat
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Default Review of recent low-fat research that makes sense (well, uhm,to me... ;)

Enrico C wrote:

The important thing the new study DOES actually suggest, as I
understand it, is that the old myth "the lesser fat, the better" is
not true any longer.

Correct me if I am wrong.


Did anyone actually read the study?

It showed nothing. $415 million down the toilet.

They asked a subset of women to adhere to 20% fat diets. The
women reported 29%, but they probably actually ate more like
39% fat.

The low-fat group reported a daily kcal intake of 1500 (down from
the 1800 initial) and yet their weights went down only 2.2 kg that
year. With such a deficit, they should have lost about 14 kg (mean)
after the first year. Do the math: -300*365/3500/2.2 = -14.2 kg
[details in table 2 of the paper]. Where are the other 12 kg
these woman should have lost?

Might they have misrepresented their intakes?

Ernst Schaefer, one of the leading CHD scientists, once wrote a paper
on the inaccuracies of the food frequency questionnaire method (AJCN,
Vol. 71, No. 3, 746-751, March 2000). One of the most inaccurate items
is fat intake. Almost everyone underreports it. The same is true for
kcals.

So the women had to be misrepresenting their intakes, which were still
pretty junky if they took in less than 15 g fiber per day. I pity their
tragic colons.

We still must explain why incidences of hormonal cancers are much
lower among populations with lower fat intakes.

The moderate to high fat Mediterranean diet is a big improvement over
SAD, but Mediterranean rates of breast and prostate cancers are much
higher than those in the lower fat Japanese, Korean, and Chinese
contingents. These differences cannot be due to genetics because when
they immigrate to the USA their rates go up.