HAHAHAH!!!!! In your FACE, low-fat diets!!!

[Neurotik]

@RTFirefly

My personal experience is that losing weight isn’t all that easy. If it’s not one of your top three goals at a given time, you’re probably not going to succeed in losing weight - and most of us have complicated enough lives so that it can’t always make the top three.

I’m not freaking talking about losing weight, though. And neither is the study in question. I’m talking about getting a healthy diet. It’s perfectly possibly to eat a well-rounded, nutritious meal but still gain weight because you’re eating too much of it and not getting enough exercise.

My entire point is that you don’t need fancy nutrition studies to tell you what is a healthy diet and what isn’t.

And as someone who’s almost entirely given up fast food and non-diet drinks, and doesn’t eat that much preprocessed food, and who thinks that a 30-mile bike ride is a pleasant way to spend a summer morning, I can tell you that even sustaining a certain weight, let alone losing weight, isn’t easy.

Never said it was. I said that proper nutrition is easy and you don’t need a fad diet or the latest, greatest nutritional study to tell you what a healthy diet is.

It’s just not that simple.

Except proper nutrition is that simple. Whether that results in weight loss or not, may be. But the actual diet itself is for most people.

[uglybeech]

@Neurotik

My entire point is that you don’t need fancy nutrition studies to tell you what is a healthy diet and what isn’t.

Evidence? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence.

[uglybeech]

@Left Hand of Dorkness

The study’s findings, as near as I can tell are limited:

A modest change in dietary fat levels, accompanied by a modest increase in consumption of fruit and vegetables, but not necessarily accompanied by a change in total caloric intake, does not have a statistically significant effect on breast cancer levels in women over a relatively short-term study.

I read the comments and the abstract, but not the meat of the study. There may be more conclusions that can be drawn from the meat. I do not trust media sources to report dietary studies accurately.

Daniel

Daniel, you don’t understand. You saw the abstract of one of three huge studies. The first was about breast cancer (the one you read the abstract of, and frankly the most encouraging of the three studies though it’s results were still dismal). The second was about colorectal cancer. The third was about cardiovascular disease. These studies were huge. This came out of the same enormous multicenter study that finally resolved the hormone replacement therapy controversy and showed it to increase mortality.

The intervention group maintained on average an 8% decrease in total fat consumption. About a 3% decrease in saturated fat consumption. The subjects didn’t all reach the diets they were told to shoot for, but they achieved 70% of what the goal had in mind to study. They showed on average an extra serving of fruits and vegetables and a quarter serving of grains extra. This is a serious dietary intervention over such a large population. And as the studies said (and I agree) about as good as you could expect in “free living subjects.” Over 8 years they showed an nonsignificant change in breast cancer risk, no change in colorectal cancer risk, no change in cancer in general actually and no change in cardiovascular risk of any kind. NADA.

Yes, you could argue that if the subjects all reached “recommended” diets that you’d see a difference. But for the colorectal cancer and cardiovascular studies there wasn’t even a trending pattern here. Those that adhered better didn’t do better. And maybe if they’d been on it longer, they’d do better, but they didn’t find a trend towards more benefits at the end of the study than at the beginning. For the breast cancer study there was some trending towards lowered risk at the end of 8 years or among those who adhered better - but this wasn’t a significant trend. The most encouraging evidence was that trans or saturated fat reductions may have had a decreased risk, but on that score they didn’t have a good enough sample to draw any firm conclusions.

So maybe I still worry about trans and saturated fats, but this is pretty strong evidence that just worrying about fat intake in general is a pretty pointless exercise. You may want even more definitive data, but it’s unlikely taht anyone’s ever going to have the money to do a study any better than this on that point.