I hate to unleash an old Reaganism on all of you, but when it comes to medical studies, facts tend to be stupid things. Take the current one splashed across all headlines: low-fat diets don't protect woman against cancer or heart disease. Kind of a bummer to find out gnawing all those Snackwell's did you no good, and you might as well have been downing Oreos instead. Except it's not necessarily so. A few caveats:
• The Diets Weren't Low-Fat, or at least not by much. The normal American diet is 35% fat, by the end of the study, the average woman in the study was consuming 29% of her calories in fat.
• The Results Apply to Older Women, as the average age was 62. It's possible various dietary habits have different, stronger, or unexpected affects if begun earlier.
• We Already Knew This. Absolute quantity of fats aren't the issue, types are. That's where all the Mediterranean Diet hype comes from. Awhile back, the AHA (if memory serves) put one group of patients with advanced heart disease on their diet and another on the Mediterranean Diet -- they eventually called off the study, as those on the AHA's plan were dying too quickly. If you're consuming 30% of your calories in the form of trans- or saturated fats, you're not gonna do too well. If you're consuming 40% in the guise of olive oil (mono- and polyunsaturated fats) and salmon (omega 3s), however, you're in good shape. How a diet that's both low-fat and centered on good fats would fare remains unclear.
• 2/3rds of medical studies have their results subsequently overturned. Think about that for a minute.
