The results may well have been positive if the diet used had been a low carb one. While the type of diet used is not mentioned in the article, I have no doubt that it was a low-fat, high grain diet.

Same story from the Washington Post says:



Yikes. Lower calories and Slimfast!



So they went from 200 to 190 by cutting calories a little and drinking some Slimfast? And this is a legitimate study? It sounds more like a monumental waste of time and money.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...b829_story.html

(Edited to fix link.)

What a horrible study!

For the participants, especially. Gee, creating a source of stress didn't drop heart attack incidence.

NIH news release:
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/oct2012/niddk-19.htm

Doesn't it seem unlikely that they stuck to these diet/exercise regimens for 11 years? And only lost 5% of their weight?

If that were true, it would seem to negate any diet/exercise/weight loss argument.

OMG! I just noticed this -




$220,000,000.00. To tell a bunch of people to eat a little less and drink some Slimfast. Then apparently forget about them for 11 years (how else to explain this??). Then call off the study.

Your tax dollars at work.

And the worst part of this is when I first heard of this study this morning on television, the reporter said something along the lines of "a new study shows diet and exercise are no help in preventing heart attack and stroke in people with type 2 diabetes."

Peter at Hyperlipid has a posted about this:

Link

And one of the comments says



Dear God, they put these poor people on a high carb diet. Some nutritional "experts" should be shot.

Yet:

I'm no expert but even I can see that their working hypothesis is wrong on at least two points. They looked at the wrong risk factors, they used the wrong intervention.

Shocking. Still I was stupid enough to try calorie restricted low fat dieting for 20 years despite it never working.

I might have quit earlier though if it was costing me $220million.

A while back they did a study in which they aggressively lowered blood glucose levels in diabetics with drugs without changing their diets and when their health outcomes didn't improve they concluded that lowering blood glucose levels didn't help diabetics.

Now they've done a study in which diabetics eating lots of carbs (and I'll bet - lots of 'healthy whole grains') saw no improvement in cardiac outcomes and concluded that diet and exercise don't help diabetics either.

Guess if you get diabetes you might as well make out your will and keep on eating donuts and pie. Good grief.

Putting diabetics on a weight loss diet whilst increasing carb/sugar intake to 75% of daily calorie intake does not assist in long term control of blood sugar shocker!

It was the ADA diet, and if there was no weight loss after a set time (read it hours ago and now I forget...4 weeks?) they switched to either Slim-fast or Glucerna to replace some of the calories.

Not sure what the ADA diet is nowadays...more reading for me.

*edit: I went on the ADA site and couldn't find a diet! Everything says to make a plan with your doctor. That's all over the place. My Kaiser doctor told me low carb was a good diet and to stay on it. I'm sure most don't.

Summary: they stopped the study before it could prove that the Food Pyramid kills.


Healthy Eating

Exactamundo! Plus, get on those drugs, stat!

That's funny. I also looked at LookAhead materials that said participants would be following the ADA diet. Maybe its the same as the food pyramid.