New Study

[khiuser]

There was a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that essentially found that "diets lower in carbohydrate and higher in protein and fat are not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease in women". I find this difficult to believe and would love to have someone more trained read through the study and find out if there are any errors in the method or statistics that would account for such a finding. The study is entitled Low-Carbohydrate-Diet Score and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women and can be found at

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/355/19/1991

Looking forward to hearing what anyone has to say!

[DianeR]

Short of getting access to the entire article, I can't really comment specifically about this study. (Assuming I were qualified, which is a BIG assumption )

However, look at what Dr. McDougall has said about past studies in his newsletters. Often what is considered high carbohydrate, low fat is NOT what a McDougaller would mean! I think before in the Nurses studies, there simply isn't a significant enough number of them who have eaten anything close to a McDougall diet. So you can't really draw any conclusion from them.

I remember there was one study recently where people were concluding that "low fat doesn't work." (I can't remember if it used the Nurses cohort or not, but same problem ...) The difference was something like 30% was considered low fat, and 33% was considered a regular diet. Of course, you aren't going to see any difference that way. Dr. McDougall and others warned before the study was undertaken that the fat reduction would not be enough to show anything -- but the investigators didn't listen.

At least this is my recollection. Anyone with the actual links or more definite information should feel free to correct me!

Dr. McDougall is good in analyzing new research for us in his newsletters. You can wait ... or even email him directly. If you do the latter and get an answer, please post back what he says.

[Sunny]

You can find this article at the Lounge part of this board, it was posted by
Purdy. "AP articles most amazing 1st paragraph"

[DianeR]

Yeah, I've read in my own hometown paper about the study. However, a newpaper article isn't the same thing as the study itself.