Think about the health-related stories you've seen in the media recently, particularly ones related to diet. How much helpful information have you been given? How much education about science and how it works? If you pay attention to such things, as I do, most of what you've seen probably has to do with single studies about how this diet or that diet is related to this or that health outcome. But how helpful is this, really?In the vast majority of cases, not very. Sure, occasionally there are large important studies that track tens of thousands of people over decades. These may give us some reason to sit up and take notice. But for the most part, scientific knowledge does not come from knowing the outcomes of single studies. It comes from the gradual assembly of many many studies, some of which may contradict each other, or at least seem to. (By figuring out why the seeming contradictions are occurring we can learn a lot.) But relatively seldom will you see a piece of science news that actually tries to give readers a context for the information they are being presented with, or to synthesize the results of the scientific data on a subject. Unfortunately, as the number of paid positions for science reporters shrinks, the ones left have less and less time to write these types of reports.
This all becomes even more of an issue when reporting about research where animals are used to try to understand human biology. For one thing, it's somewhat hit or miss whether the rat or the mouse (especially the genetically-altered one) responds as humans do. For another, animal studies are a perfect set-up for reporter bias.
I've done it myself when reading diet studies done on animals - if the conclusion agrees with what I already think is probably true, I see it as confirming evidence. If not, well, what the heck, it's just an animal study, right? I feel it is part of my job to fight this impulse, but unfortunately I see signs of it everywhere in the media.
A few weeks ago, a study was published in a journal called Molecular Neurodegeneration. Of the thousands of diet studies which are published every year, somehow this one rose to the surface, and after I saw an article about it, I gave the study a glance. It seemed to be the kind of basic science study that doesn't tell us much in and of itself, but might be fodder for more experiments. In other words, not something that it is helpful to report about. But over the next weeks, articles about the study kept popping up in my Google Alerts until now there are well over one hundred of them, with headlines such as "High Protein Diet may increase risk of Alzheimer's Disease" and "High Protein Diet Shrinks Brain". Even worse, many of the articles go on to suggest that the high-protein diet the mice were on is similar to the Atkins Diet. A tabloid even used the headline "Atkins Diet Makes Your Brain Shrink".
When you actually read the study, you find that mice (genetically altered to be prone to Alzheimer's disease) were fed one of four diets (normal, low-fat, high-fat, high-protein), and the diet that was most similar to the Atkins diet is not the high-protein one at all, but the high-fat one. The high-protein diet was 60%(!!) protein, much higher than recommendations of the Institute of Medicine and virtually everyone else. No big shock that it had negative effects (in this case, the brains of the mice were 5% lighter). And yet, the articles in the media had lines such as "A link between a high protein Atkins diet and a significantly reduced brain mass has been identified by scientists." Misleading, and total hogwash!
The study, and the report based on it, has issues that are problematic, but these were never even mentioned in the media reports. For example, the article starts out by stating that diets rich in fruits, vegetables, and fish have been shown to be protective against Alzheimer's disease. This could be true, but the test diets were totally lacking in any of those foods. So even if mouse chow with a certain mix of protein, carb, and fat is shown to be problematic, that says nothing about a situation where humans are eating actual healthy food. This is obviously pertinent to human beings, but is not mentioned by even one of the articles about the study which I read, nor was the fact that the body weight of the high-protein diet was also the lowest. Were these mice underweight? We aren't told. If they were malnourished, could that make their brains smaller? (To humans, a 60% protein diet is unpalatable and could conceivably cause a person to not eat enough for basic nourishment.) These are only a few of the very obvious questions which were not asked.
On the other hand, there have been animal studies about low-carb diets which were only reported by a very few media outlets. In one, rats were given either a high-fat, low-carb diet or a moderate-carb, moderate fat diet. It turned out that the rats on the low-carb diet were better able to handle stress. In another study, rats with spinal cord injuries recovered more quickly on a low-carb diet than on a high-carb one.
Are any of these studies significant to human beings? Only time will tell. But it is interesting which one is getting all the attention (and misreporting).
Photo: Sandy Jones/Getty Images
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Before Atkins I was using about 90% of my brain worrying about my health. After dropping 85 lbs and keeping it off for nine years now, I no longer need as much brain to get on with other things anyway. If these doctors were so smart they would know by now that they are wasting their time trying to get us off low carb. I guess that all the energy they’re wasting on us must have shrunk their brain!