In the news this morning - Low Carb Shortens Life!

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(Eamon) #1

On the UK TV News this morning, and in the papers, they are reporting on a study supposedly showing that Low Carb Diets shorten life expectancy. My work colleagues have wasted no time telling me my diet is killing me!
Here’s the Guardian Article

The main spokeperson foir the study seems to be Dr Sara Seidelmann, who is a cardiologist and a nutritionist. I wonder if she is also a vegetarian as she seems to be a bit anti-meat products, here’s her quote from the article:
“However, our data suggests that animal-based low-carbohydrate diets, which are prevalent in North America and Europe, might be associated with shorter overall life span and should be discouraged. Instead, if one chooses to follow a low-carbohydrate diet, then exchanging carbohydrates for more plant-based fats and proteins might actually promote healthy ageing in the long term.”

Anyway, the study is based on self-reporting using 2 questionaires, 6 years apart, and also takes in data from various other studies around the world. It has a very large number of cohorts, which is good, but the value of these observational studies is very limited and there must be a lot of external influences not accounted for. They admit that they cannot prove cause and effect with this study, but continue to bash meat and meat based products as the villain.

So does anyone know if this group of researchers have an anti-meat agenda?

Research just out suggests low carb is bad?
Article on the Dangers of Low Carb
(Ellie) #2

Don’t know if they have an anti meat agenda, but their idea of low carb is 20-30% and they relied on people telling them twice in 25 years what they ate!!
I read the article but have filed it in ‘nonesense’.
I can well imagine that if you eat 30% of you calories from carbs and still eat fat then it may be less than ideal. But they are not keto by a long way and not even low carb as we know it, just the lowest third of the group they were studying.
Quite aside from the issue of people self declaring their food and portions…

(Norma Laming) #3

Surely the point should be to evaluate the research?

#4

I just read the Lancet paper and, although it is an observational study, I thought the results were interesting (although I don’t have a good grasp of some of their statistical methods). I would have liked to know more about what causes for mortality increased in the low-carb groups, but they didn’t say any more than that the effect was seen both for cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular mortality. I think the media’s spin on the research is so typical and one-sided. The way I understood it, the low-carbers with high intake of fat and protein from plant sources had a LOWER than average mortality. I’m curious what everyone thinks of the study, so I’m hoping for more comments here =)

(Omar) #5

That is good news

Assuming the news is correct.

You live healthy all your life on ketogenic diet.

And you live shorter but you leave with dignity before your children send you to care homes and they make you wear diapers. :grin:

#6

Confounding and extraneous variables make many studies like this useless!

(KCKO, KCFO) #7

Just more fake news, nothing to see here, move along.

#8

I saw this on CNN mobile this morning. I took a quick look at the article in Lancet and found that their
“research” was pretty much people self-reporting! I don’t know how they could trust the self-reporting because most people lie about what they eat, whether it’s the amount, or the actual items or whatever! No real science behind it, IMO.

Also, the difference between the “moderate” carbers and the low carbers was ~4 years. Considering that a lot of us on keto are dealing w/ a multitude of chronic illnesses - HTN, hyperlipidemia, obesity, T2DM - the fact that we are “only” living to 78 years is pretty amazing! Without keto, we would be dead before age 70!

Discard, and KCKO!

#9

Exactly! Crap science!

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #10

As I’ve posted in the four other threads about this study, one of the authors, Walter Willet, works with Seidelmann at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. When he was working for Frederick Stare at the Harvard University School of Public Health, he and Stare co-wrote reports demonizing meat and saturated fat, in a campaign orchestrated and paid for by the sugar industry, to take the heat off sugar (this was all reported in a recent book by a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, who discovered a cache of sugar-industry memos that had been donated to a library collection).

It was on the basis of a report ghost-written by the sugar industry and signed by Willett and Stare, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration came to consider sugar as “Generally Recognized as Safe.” (Meaning that the sugar industry never had to do any studies to prove that sugar has no harmful effects when added to food.)

#11

@Brenda (to merge threads - I think this is #4 by my count…)