Brand-Spankin’ New Study: Are Low-Carb Meat Eaters in Trouble?
It's amazing to see sensational headlines like, "Low carb diets might be deadly." People read these headlines without reading the article or the study that is quoted and take the headline as fact. I saw this first hand when I posted the article, "Low-carb, high-protein diet increases risk of death from all causes..." and received responses such as "well duh!"
The fact is that low carb/real food diets have been misrepresented for years. Unfortunately, all of this misinformation has become accepted as fact when it's not anywhere close to the truth. To make matters worse, these so called studies come out to further perpetuate these myths and encourage people toward pharmaceuticals and highly processed foods.Amplify’d from rawfoodsos.com
A few of you lovely readers emailed me today (thanks!) about the study Low-Carbohydrate Diets and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. This paper compares mortality rates for folks eating a so-called “animal-based diet” versus a so-called “vegetable-based diet,” both of them so-called “low carbohydrate.” I finally got a chance to look at it, and indeed, a glance at the abstract looks a little spooky for any low-carb omnivores out there:
A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.
Oh noes! This abstract sounds vaguely China-Study-esque, with the conclusion that plant-based diets are healthier than ones featuring more animal foods. Was this study really comparing hardcore meat eaters with plant noshers, like the abstract implies? Is animal protein poison after all? Is it time to ditch the steaks and bow down in phytoestrogenic reverence to the almighty tofu?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: In most cases, abstracts tell you a whole ‘lotta nothing—so don’t judge a study until you’ve read the full text.
For right now, I’ll give this study the benefit of the doubt and ignore the fact that A) the researchers used a pretty lame decile-based scoring system* and B) employed the notoriously unreliable food-frequency questionnaire to collect their data.
I’ll sum it up. Some of these “low carbers” were eating up to 60% of their diet as carbohydrates (first decile), which—last time I checked—is kind of not low-carb. Even the lowest low-carb eaters were still eating over 37% of their calories from carbohydrates. Whoever decided to call this study “low carbohydrate” is nuttier than a squirrel turd. That doesn’t mean it can’t offer anything useful, though, so let’s look at what else is going on in the highest decile for each group (which is the only decile the researchers really looked at):
- Folks in the Animal Group were more likely to smoke and had higher BMIs than adherents of the Vegetable Group. Along with influencing mortality outcomes, this suggests the Animal Food group, in the aggregate, may have been somewhat less health-conscious than the dieters lumped into the vegetable category. And that’s the type of thing that has repercussions for other diet and lifestyle choices that weren’t measured in the study.
- The Vegetable Group was nowhere near plant-based: They derived almost 30% of their daily calories from animal sources (animal fat and animal protein), versus about 45% for the Animal Group. If we compare the middle (fifth) decile, the Vegetable Group was eating a greater percent of total calories from animal foods than the Animal Group was. D’oh!
- The Vegetable Group ate more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains than the Animal Group—which begs the question: What kinds of carbohydrates filled this macronutrient void for the animal-food eaters? Could it’ve been refined grains and processed carbs, which the study conveniently forgot to document?
- For the Vegetable Group, cancer and cardiovascular mortality was lower in the tenth decile than the first decile, even though both deciles ate exactly the same amount of red meat and nearly the same amount of total animal foods. This suggests animal products aren’t the driving force behind differences in mortality rates.
- Similarly, at the fifth decile, the Vegetable Group had a lower cardiovascular mortality hazard ratio than the Animal Group (0.99 versus 1.21), even though the Vegetable Group was eating a slightly greater proportion of animal foods (33.3% versus 29.9% of total energy for women; 32.9% versus 31% for men).
Bottom line: In this study, when you look closer at the data, differences in mortality appear to be unrelated to animal product consumption. Changes in cancer and cardiovascular risk ratios occur out of sync with changes in animal food intake.
So what is responsible for the Vegetable Group’s lower mortality hazard ratios (and the Animal Group’s higher ones)?
Here’s a clue. Every time the researchers made multivariate adjustments to the data to account for the risk factors they did document (including physical activity, BMI, alcohol consumption, hypertension, and smoking, among other things), the hazard ratio went down for the Animal Group (meaning it got better) and it went up for the Vegetable Group (meaning it got worse). That indicates pretty clearly that the Animal Group had more proclivity to disease right from the get go, regardless of meat consumption, and the Vegetable Group may have been more health-aware than most folks. (To see what I’m talking about, look at the mortality tables under the “10″ column, and compare the “Age- and energy-adjusted HR” with the “Multivariate-adjusted HR” for each group.)
In other words, it looks like what this study really measured was a Standard American Diet group (aka Animal Group) and a slightly-less Standard American Diet group (aka Vegetable Group). Both ate sucky diets, but the latter had slightly less suckage. You can bet the farm that neither was anything close to “low carb.” And if you have two farms, you can bet the other one that neither diet group was anything near plant-based, so I’m not sure the vegan crowd has much to gloat about here.
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