As a low carber, I want to be more like Christopher Gardner, and less like Dean Ornish. If a study shows a therapeutic effect with a low fat whole food vegan diet vs. the SAD, and if studies keep showing up with these effects, and really, they have, I pretty much have to admit that there's something there.

I don't care about a lot of the results, all the blah about cholesterol, but a 12 kilogram loss without excluding dropouts and without telling people to restrict calories is something we'd cheer for if this was a low carb study. Hba1c dropped from 6.0 to 5.5, waist circumference by 9 cm, these are decent results. Again, compared to the SAD.

Or maybe not technically the SAD, "normal care" might have included some dietary advice. But the SAD is about 35 percent fat, and the standard dietary advice is to keep fat to 30 percent fat, which is always baffling, why anybody would expect such a small decrease in fat intake to have any effect whatsoever is beyond me.