An Open Comment to Dr. Dean Ornish
In today's New York Times, science writer John Tierey has an interesting column called "The End of the Diet Wars?" detailing some of Dr. Dean Ornish's response to the recent diet study which I reported about on this site. (Original Blog Post, Blog About the Media's Response, My Analysis of the Study) This is to present the "other side" of a previous column detailing the response of journalist Gary Taubes to the study.
Dr. Ornish makes factual errors in his statement, such as that the low-carb diet recommended in the study was vegetarian. Although the low-carb group was instructed to look for plant sources of protein and fat, there is nothing to indicate that the diet was to be vegetarian, and in fact the head researcher has stated that the diet was not vegetarian. (That Dr. Ornish made statements of fact is not surprising as he has been one of the chief perpetuators of many of the myths surrounding low-carb eating.)
Although Dr. Ornish may be right that there have been baby steps towards a consensus of what makes a healthy diet, there are is still a very large gap between the high-carb diet he recommends and a reduced-carbohydrate approach, which is helpful to many people. (I also agree with him that the diet needs to be tailored to the individual.) Here is the comment which I added to Tierney's Column:
Note to Dr. Ornish:
It's all about the blood glucose and insulin. While some people can consume (for example) brown rice and high-sugar fruit without large increases in blood glucose and/or insulin, many of us cannot. Of course, refined grains and sugars do raise glucose more than whole grains, but guess what? Once you grind those grains up into flour (which is how most so-called whole grains are consumed in the U.S.), they break down just as or almost as quickly into sugar as their white counterparts.
The bare facts: All carbohydrates (with some exceptions such as fiber) break down into sugar in our bodies. Diabetes is a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism. The number of people in this country who are on the "Diabetes Spectrum" is huge. Diabetics, pre-diabetics, insulin resistant folks, as well as people whose blood glucose is elevated but aren't quite to pre-diabetes levels, are not only growing in number, but in older age groups may even be in the majority. In my opinion it is irresponsible to suggest that these people follow anything similar to a "food pyramid" with carbohydrates as the base of the diet.
I do agree that the recent study had flaws in that the low-carb group wasn't very low in carbohydrates after the first few months, and the low-fat group wasn't very low in fat. The effects of both diets were potentially blunted. But I would also point out that even with these more modest changes there was not one health measure on which the lower-fat group was in significantly better shape than the lower-carb group, whereas the reverse was the case on many of the measures.
Photo © Elke Rohn
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