The video is lengthy but extremely interesting. The speaker pretty much said “it was a bitter pill for me, a long time vegetarian, to conclude that Atkins works, but that’s what the studies show”. The video goes through a lot of research, cites pros and cons of each study, how the conclusions can be considered flawed by the methodologies, etc. but, in the end, he concludes that Atkins works. I had some time this afternoon and watched it and found it pretty engaging. Not a lot about diabetes, mostly food and weight loss and trying to evaluate the different approaches, low carb vs. low fat.
I’m not talking about the video. I didn’t watch it but I’m not surprised there are speakers who stand up and say lots of things on youtube. I’m talking about the link to what looks like a research paper that BSC provided in his initial post. I am really bothered by a link to what looks like an independent peer-reviewed paper but it seems that it really isn’t.
The dude in the video, Chrstopher Gardner is a professor@ Stanford (LINK)and the video itself is of a survey of academic literature in that field to answer the question of whether or not low carb or low fat is better, or something like that. It is long but, given the frequency of the debate here @ Tu it seems interesting and very pertinent. Several of the “citations” in the video address studies that, while they are outside of the specific focus of low carb, address other issues that crop up, “feelings of fullness”, etc. It also sort of illuminated why it is so difficult to do studies “you have to feed them for a month, it’s not cheap!”.
I suspect any papers about food are funded by the food industry, on one side or the other. The egg and meat lobbies on one side and the fruit lobbies on another and the grain lobby along with the rest. The video seems very much to be in an academic context. I dunno, maybe Gardner is on the take too but he also had a very entertaining manner about what could have been super dull and I found it very interesting and informative.
You didn’t hear me. I didn’t ask a question about the video - I asked a question about the paper that BSC linked to:THIS ONE
As far as I can tell the paper is funded not by the food industry, but by the low-carb industry.
But who are the “low carb industry” besides maybe the meat, egg and fish lobbies? Nuts too I suppose. Maybe lettuce gets a piece of the action?
I understand you are questioning the provenance of that paper but, if the study has scientifc foundation, someone funding it doesn’t necessarily make it “wrong”. I don’t see that there’s a huge amount of dough in low carb, other than selling books which, these days, is not exactly a booming industry either? There’s way more money in the “food pyramid” I think than in a few clinicians suggesting what their clinical experience (Dr. Bernstein is the main one I’ve heard of but some of the other names look vaguely familiar…) has told them?
While Bernstein, to cite the guy I’ve heard of the most in the masthead of the article, practices medicine and sells books and videos as far as I can tell. I have always felt him to have been very sincere in that 1) he’s on “the team”, in that he had diabetes 2) his (admittedly his own…) story about having studied bg early on, before it was clinical practice seems both engaging and credible and 3) he seems to be selling it as a solution to the problems many of us face? I can’t fault him for that. If he’s loaded enough from selling books to fudn his own study, that’s ok w/ me too.
The video doesn’t mention that article in it’s review of academic literature but it runs through a bunch of other studies using Gardner’s own work, with some other guy whose name escapes me, which do, in fact, appear to show, using a large study with several hundred subjects to measure the efficiacy of 4 diet plans. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20573800?dopt=Abstract&otool=stanford
I looked over the references cited at the end of the article and found what appeared to me to be many scientific papers published in places like The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, JAMA, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition etc. Some are available in the form of a PubMed abstract and others have links to the full article. I read several of them and they confirm the portions of the article to which they are relevant. Other citations are from books like the South Beach Diet and one of Dr Bernsteins books.
I note that at the top of the page the article is termed a review (of scientific papers?) and does not really claim to be original research. It was published itself in PubMed which is a website of the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health. I don’t know what their criteria for inclusion is but presumably they saw no conflict of interest.
Oy… Yes, bsc, we are on our own with D. I’m T1 but I’ve noticed that keeping carbs at a minimum allows me to take less insulin. I test frequently so I’m not going too low, I’m not obsessed with numbers but try to keep things below 120 and at a level that makes me FEEL good, so I see the less carb thing in action very clearly when I test.
They need some diabetic doctors in these studies who use themselves as guinea pigs – as much as things differ from one person to another, not eating a lot of carbs seems to be generally beneficial to all kinds of people in general, not just diabetics…
I am not diabetic but my husband is a T1. My boss got very scared when my husband was diagnosed due to the fact he was very sick and my bosses BS were quite high. His A1c was 6.8 at the time of my husband diagnoses and decided he needed to do something. He didn’t want the diagnoses from his doctor so he started asking me questions, I had done a lot of research as my husband couldn’t with the Retnaopathy. I told him to go back to low carb as he use to do for weight loss. That was less than 6 months ago and his A1c this time was 6.1, don’t tell me low carb doesn’t work! He is not on any meds as his doctor has not diagnosed him with T2, does he have it, YES but he wants to work at dealing with it with diet and exersize at this time.
Doctors, ADA, ADtA and a lot of dietitians are clueless as to what is good or not good! 20 years ago they said eat margarine because fat is bad for you, guess what they are now saying don’t eat margarine eat butter! What do I tell people? Eat WHOLE FOODS ONLY, that will reduce many of your health problems. I am no expert but I do use common sense. 30 years of continued increase in Obesity and Diabetes, What has happened in those 30 years? Low Fat, no Fat Diets, Fast Food Chains on every corner, Drinking soda’s everyday, energy drinks, less exersize, bigger portions at home and at restaruants, PROCESSED FOODS AND more drugs for every ailment you have!! When did we have low levels of Obesity and Diabetes? When we ate Whole Food and ate because we were hungery not because we were sitting in front of the TV and got the munchies!!
I have been a low carber for 8+ years now and I have never felt better, before I was sick everyday and always thought it was the red meat until I didn’t eat pasta, potato’s or rice with the red meat, I havent’ been sick from red meat since! And I haven’t eaten Pasta or Rice since, potato’s very rarely (got to have some french fries) Again if you eat what your body can actually process then you won’t have as many problems with your health. COMMON SENSE!! This is just my observeation as I don’t have a degree in health or diets but my husbands first A1c was 12 now he’s got a 5.5, seems to me there is a correlation between the foods he eats and the glucose levels he has!! BTW he eats low carb so he doesn’t have to add insulin to his body, so it’s not the insulin that is bringing his numbers down its his diet!
So you are absolutely correct. The Nutrition and Metabolism Society is not biased against low carb diets. One must understand that although no study showing positive results for low carb diets would ever get past the editorial process at Diabetes Care, it doesn’t make Diabetes Care totally bogus. Does that make Diabetes Care biased? Sure. biased, but not bogus. Would those same rejected papers get reviewed and accepted at the N&M Society? I don’t know, perhaps if they passed peer reviewed standards. The N&M Society has the same peer reviewed standards as other professional scholarly societies and in fact the N&MS reviews are accepted by other professional societies such as Biomed central.
The truth is that the situation is no longer Richard Bernstein arguing about low carb and being dismissed as a fringe isolated character. Instead, we have a broad group of respected researchers, educated at leading institutions, Annika Dahlqvist, Richard Feinman, Katharine Morrison Eric C Westman, Jay Wortman, and Stephen Phinney.
Is the N&M Society peer reviewed? Yes, just like Diabetes Care. Is it applying the same scholarly standards as Diabetes Care? As far as I can tell they have applied standards of objectivity equivalent or higher than Diabetes Care.
So who do you trust? You have to decide. Read the research. You decide.
Wow, I am stunned and saddened that Diabetes Health would publish this rubbish from Hope Warshaw. Diabetes Health used to be the only cutting edge D publication out there! ADA, on the other hand, has always worked against people with diabetes, IMO.
Actually, this is kinda funny. Christopher Gardner is a self identified vegetarian. It must have been fairly hard for him to report on research results that suggest that a high carb diet (which is what most vegetarian diets are) does not perform well for insulin resistant patients.
He says the results of his ATOZ study were a “bitter pill for me to swallow”, for that very reason. I think though that the conclusion was that the pro-low carb results were better across the board for everyone. He did point out that the positive results were small though. I think part of the problem with that is that it, as he explains in detail, is very difficult to run these sort of studies because of the cost and because the volunteers are naturally averse to being limited. Part of the interesting thing about the ATOZ study was that their process was to teach the book and let the people run with it, to measure the efficacy of the books themselves? I thought that was an interesting way to perspectivize it!
Ah, my laugh for the evening, spot on, thanks Alan!
The docs tell Type 2’s to test rarely for a couple of reasons. In no particular order 1) they think that Type 2’s are too afraid of needles and will not comply with more frequent testing, and 2) early Type 2 (that’s all they treat – late Type 2 apparently doesn’t exist!) BGs tend to be much more stable than Type 1 (except for low carbers, who do not enter the doctors’ awareness), so if they tested fasting at 150 today, more than likely they were around there yesterday and tomorrow, and for much time to come. This is basically true if they follow their dietitian’s meal plan, and eat the same amounts of basically the same stuff every day, but woe is them if they are unself-disciplined, and vary the times and amounts of food!
Well, in the very beginning, they tried to stick me with that stuff, and I actually did try for a while. But what they were saying didn’t make sense to me in view of what I was seeing, so I went into total rebellion. Stinky squirrel mind strikes again. But the VAST majority of Type 2’s doesn’t know any better, and believes in what their docs tell them. They don’t know enough to be angry, let alone do anything about it. And WE are pretty powerless to do anything about it, because we don’t have the qualifications, and there is no reason why anyone should listen to us.
Best Type 2 in the US in my mind is bsc, because he took matters into his own hands, and educated himself, and did what he needed to do in SPITE of doctors. That’s a rare gift he gave himself; most Type 2’s don’t have a clue that they can do that. Breaks my heart.
Hope Warshaw is well known to be a high-carb advocate, and NOT everyone in the field agrees with her. Unfortunately, she is a famous bigwig, and gets heard, even if she’s full of it.
We have to continue our undercover education efforts – we have to reach out and educate people, because obstructive bigwigs aren’t going to do it – and we can’t afford to wait until they die!
Cynical as hell!
Indeed. I was sharing the idea of low carb with a new ADA poster and was chided for ‘discouraging’ new members with an ‘unsustainable’ idea ‘doomed to failure’. Personally I find high bgs unsustainable and organ damage and amputations discouraging but what do I know.
The gold standard of evidence has always been randomized controlled trials where patients get assigned into an arm of the study. Allowing patients to “choose” has it’s own problems, particularly when they choose one arm or another for a “reason.” That reason can be a confounding factor and the study itself can devolve into a study of the “reason,” not a study of low carb diets. But you are certainly right, studies involving diets are traditionally very difficult and costly. I made a point of Gardners study because it was of high quality and long duration. And the results seem to credibly demonstrate that low carb diets were markedly superior to the other diets in virtually all measures for insulin resistant people.
It doesn’t say it works for everyone and it doesn’t say it is the only way. But it does give sounds evidence that it is a viable option long-term diet option for insulin resistant T2s.
Thank you Natalie, but you must admit, I am also a Type Weird and atypical. And the path that I took was long and arduous, just like yours. That is not something that any of us should have to go through.