Thursday January 8th, 2009
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Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez Speaks on Low Fat Study
Posted by Marisa Belger on February 9, 2006 - 12:09pm.
This week on LIME Radio's The Good Life Show , Jesse Dylan interviewed Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, a leading expert in nutritional medicine.
Jesse Dylan: Front page, New York Times today, headline says, “Low Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risk.” This is a brand new study that's come out. Can we talk about this a little bit?
Dr. Gonzalez: Yeah. It's an incredible study and it's going to undo fifty years of dogma within the medical establishment that low fat is good and high fat is bad. It's a 450 million dollar study financed by the National Institutes of Health... It was done with women, thousands and thousands of women. And what they'd thought they would find is that low fat diets not only help heart disease, but would help prevent cancer. And they found it had no effect at all… It's a major study because for the last 50 years all the orthodox academic establishments like the National Institutes of Health and like the National Institute of Heart and Lung have proposed a low fat diet as the way to go and they may have been doing a major disservice to a lot of people…
Jesse Dylan: Where did this low fat mentality come from, then?
Dr. Gonzalez: It comes from one man who is now deceased, Ansel Keyes, who was an epidemiologist. He was a PHD physiologist and epidemiologist out of University of Minnesota and he published a series of studies in 1952, 1953, 1954 called “the six countries and the seven heart disease studies.” What he basically did, or what he claimed to do was that he looked at the heart disease rates, fat intake, and cholesterol levels among people in 22 different countries, and what he claimed he found, based on his particular study of six countries was that in every case, high cholesterol levels and high fat intake particularly was associated with high (rates) of heart disease and in those countries where there was low fat intake there was low heart disease rates. And he presented this in a series of studies. In fact, he was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1980, 1981.
What Dr. Keyes never told anybody is that he completely ignored data that contradicted his thesis. Many of the countries that he did not include in his final study that he actually had looked at actually had low heart disease rates even though their fat intake was higher than any other country. There are certain areas in Finland, for example, that eat enormous amounts of fat and have the lowest rates of heart disease on earth.
George Mann, who was a researcher at Vanderbilt University actually studied the Maasai in Africa during the ‘60s and he found that the Masaai eat about 70% of their diet as saturated fat and have absolutely no evidence of heart disease even in the oldest Maasai. And he presented that as documentation to contradict Ansel Keyes. But Ansel Keyes was very popular and he hit kind of a popular note: the idea that there was a way to intervene with diet that could effect heart disease, which was already in the ‘60s becoming a deadly killer. And people like George Mann, even though they were very serious researchers and raised serious questions, were totally and completely ignored… So the whole trend of heart disease thinking in terms of diet over the last fifty years was based really on false information.
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170 lbs is obese???
I found the info in the interview useful (much more than the investigation your mentioned in that vicious comment)
“Lime” should carefully edit the comments it gets about articles before allowing them to be posted on this website. The “comment” above, by an alleged “Dr. Martin” is a good example of why that should be.
The person describing himself as Dr. Martin does not exist – and the accusations have no merit.
The pages of this website are now defaming a fine man, and one of America’s top agents for change in a severely damaged medical system, Nicholas Gonzalez MD.
Shame on you.
It will be much harder for you, now, to get ANYONE to be interviewed – when they know they can expect, and you will publish, this kind of defamation.
When findings as groundbreaking as this week’s low-fat study hit the public, it stimulates a very natural discourse (which we encourage at LIME). I understand that innovative scientific discoveries are not without human reaction and though I appreciate strong opinions, I believe it is essential to consider many points of view. Dr. Gonzales represents one segment of the medical community that closely follows the affect of diet and nutrition on overall health and wellness. His thoughts are respected and appreciated here.
If theres a quack in the room, i think its “dr martin.” must be like a competitor or a guy with a grudge. nothing he says about the Keyes study makes any sense or any strong contradiction to what dr. gonzalez says and then martin goes ahead and makes a bunch of stuff from a long time ago that who knwos even if any of it is true that has nothing to do with what anyone is talking about, whic is the issue of the study. its pretty obvious who the real quack is.
This is fascinating stuff. I’m a huge fan of Dr. Gonzalez’s and have been following his work on nutritional approaches to cancer for years. I’m thrilled to find him here at LIME. Can we see more of the radio transcript? How does he distinguish between good and bad fats?
So is this going to bring back the Atkins diet? I smell bacon!
I wouldn’t want to go the high fat direction as a kneejerk thing necessarily, but this certainly makes sense and it is mind-blowing that the original data was essentially cooked by Dr. Keyes. I would be real curious to hear Dr. Ornish’s take on this since his entire approach is around low-fat.
Look into Dr. Gonzalez at quackwatch.org It’s not good.
I don’t think he did. This was a terrible article.
They suck people in but most don't read the entire article. Many have big bold declarations but if one reads the enitre story – they are based on studies that are not set up well. The study did not distinguish between good fats. The woman did not go as low in fat as most propose. And, they only looked at fat content. I guarantee you if you switch from French Fries and pizza to carrots, blended salads and oatmeal – you will do better. Also, the women in the study itself were lazy – they were told to reduce fat content to 20%. Guess what? They made it to 29%! They did not increase fruits and veges very much at all.
But the most interesting point in my mind is the control group reduced their fat intake almost as much as the study participants! How could you compare? You can't. Its like taking two groups – asking one to wear seatbelts more often and telling group two to just to keep driving normally. Then, after you find out that pretty much both groups started wearing sealtbelts more often that group a's increase in seatbelt wearing didn't save lives!
The study only proved that these types of studies are useless and cause more harm than good.
It took eight years and $415 million in federal funds for researchers to conclude that a lower-fat diet does not protect against breast cancer or heart disease. At a time when we face an obesity epidemic, this study based on flawed assumptions is at best disappointing and at worst dangerously misleading.
The study involved mostly overweight postmenopausal women with an average age of 62. The methodology of singling out just one component in the American diet (fatty foods) was as flawed as it would be for us to rely on a single lifestyle change to prevent disease.
If overweight Americans now assume it makes little difference what we eat or how much we eat, this study has done little if anything to wise us up on how to live healthier lives.
It’s certainly not just an academic question here in the “Obesity Belt.” Kentucky ranks sixth worst in obesity rates, Indiana ninth and Ohio 13th.
The low-fat-diet study is part of the Women’s Health Initiative, a government project that earlier linked long use of hormone pills to higher risk of breast cancer and heart disease. This study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, can be challenged on several specifics:
Do the disappointing results mean dietary fat is irrelevant, or rather do women need to cut down on fatty foods at an earlier age if diseases are to be prevented in later life?
Would cancer rates in the low-fat-diet group have been lower if the women had been instructed to avoid saturated fats in favor of “healthy” fats, such as olive oil? (They were simply told to reduce the intake of all fat).
Would cutting food fats even lower than 24 to 29 percent of calories have been preventive?
And why just track overweight postmenopausal women?
There were departures from the design assumptions that likely reduced study power. In addition, there was a significant interaction between the HR for the intervention group compared with the comparison group for baseline dietary fat consumption. Women in the intervention group with a higher baseline percentage of energy from fat provided stronger evidence for breast cancer reduction than women in the comparison group. Also, the HR varied among breast cancer subtypes defined by tumor hormone receptor characteristics. Such variation would not be expected if the intervention had no effect on breast cancer risk.
As noted above, there were certain departures from the original study design. Although accrual goals were met, recruitment took longer than anticipated and therefore the average follow-up at the planned trial completion date was 8.1 years, rather than the original target of 9 years. In addition, the difference in the percentage of energy from fat between the women in the intervention group and women in the comparison group was only about 70% of the design goal. Relatively few women met the dietary target of 20% of energy from fat: 31.4% at year 1 and 14.4% at year 6. Also, the differences in the consumption of vegetables and fruit and grains between the intervention and comparison groups were modest. If the WHI design assumptions are revised to take into account these departures, projections are that breast cancer incidence in the intervention group would be 8% to 9% lower than in the comparison group the trial would be somewhat underpowered (projected power of approximately 60%) to detect a statistically significant difference,40 which is consistent with the observed results. This perspective is further supported by our analyses demonstrating that the magnitude of the breast cancer HR was consistent with original design assumptions in the subset of adherent women.
much more reasonable. btw, great post DM. Thx, Bob.
ting-healthy-foods-despite-todayas-headlines.html...
Ten Reasons to Keep Eating Healthy Foods Despite Today's Headlines
Today’s newspapers are blaring with crazy headlines. The New York Times, for instance, says that a “Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds.”
Dr. Fuhrman draws no such conclusions. “This study compared to groups that both ate unhealthy diets,” he says. “Look closely and you will see that the researchers compared a typical, disease-causing American diet, with one that was just marginally better, but still terribly unhealthy.”
entire article: ting-healthy-foods-despite-todayas-headlines.html...
Wow, I looked at quackwatch.org, what is this guy doing? What kind of interviewer allows that nonsense to be stated without a challenge?
What crap….