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I think another problem when it comes to government funding in regards to disease prevention is the focus. Their concern is with populations--so a lot of the focus is on epidemiology. If you want to know what makes a population healthy, why not look at populations? The answer is, because it doesn't actually work. People don't get sick because of what their neighbours are eating, if their food makes them sick, it's because of what they eat themselves.

Here's a metastudy that "shows" that low carbohydrate diets are probably unhealthy in the long term.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3555979/

Quote:

Low-Carbohydrate Diets and All-Cause Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies

Abstract
Objective

Low-carbohydrate diets and their combination with high-protein diets have been gaining widespread popularity to control weight. In addition to weight loss, they may have favorable short-term effects on the risk factors of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Our objective was to elucidate their long-term effects on mortality and CVD incidence.

Data sources

MEDLINE, EMBASE, ISI Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and ClinicalTrials.gov for relevant articles published as of September 2012. Cohort studies of at least one year’s follow-up period were included.

Review methods

Identified articles were systematically reviewed and those with pertinent data were selected for meta-analysis. Pooled risk ratios (RRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for all-cause mortality, CVD mortality and CVD incidence were calculated using the random-effects model with inverse-variance weighting.

Results

We included 17 studies for a systematic review, followed by a meta-analysis using pertinent data. Of the 272,216 people in 4 cohort studies using the low-carbohydrate score, 15,981 (5.9%) cases of death from all-cause were reported. The risk of all-cause mortality among those with high low-carbohydrate score was significantly elevated: the pooled RR (95% CI) was 1.31 (1.07–1.59). A total of 3,214 (1.3%) cases of CVD death among 249,272 subjects in 3 cohort studies and 5,081 (2.3%) incident CVD cases among 220,691 people in different 4 cohort studies were reported. The risks of CVD mortality and incidence were not statistically increased: the pooled RRs (95% CIs) were 1.10 (0.98–1.24) and 0.98 (0.78–1.24), respectively. Analyses using low-carbohydrate/high-protein score yielded similar results.

Conclusion

Low-carbohydrate diets were associated with a significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality and they were not significantly associated with a risk of CVD mortality and incidence. However, this analysis is based on limited observational studies and large-scale trials on the complex interactions between low-carbohydrate diets and long-term outcomes are needed.

The biggest problem with the low carb studies included in this meta analysis was that they didn't look at people eating low carb, they looked at the people in the populations studied who were eating the least carbohydrate. If you take the bottom 25 percent of a typical population and look at the people with the lowest carbohydrate score, they may still be eating large amounts of carbohydrate.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/8....expansion.html

Here's an example from the Nurse's Health study. The decile with the lowest carbohydrate score ate 46.1 percent fat, 29.6 percent carbohydrate, 21.9 percent protein. A diet of nothing but Big Mac's gives 51 fat, 31 carbohydrate, 18 percent protein. Pretty close. Chicken Mcnuggets have an even stronger low carb "score," 52 percent fat, 24 percent each carbs and protein.