TMPHBITEU
An amusing caveat from the medical community.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-lcn041511.php
They do this all the time, and I just think it's funny as hell:
Dr. Browning cautioned that the findings do not explain why participants on the low-carb diet saw a greater reduction in liver fat, and that they should not be extrapolated beyond the two-week period of study.
"This is not a long-term study, and I don't think that low-carb diets are fundamentally better than low-fat ones," he said. "Our approach is likely to be only of short-term benefit because at some point the benefits of weight loss alone trounce any benefits derived from manipulating dietary macronutrients such as calories and carbohydrates.
"Weight loss, regardless of the mechanism, is currently the most effective way to reduce liver fat."
Member
...while this may be true, how the fuck do you invoke weight loss without manipulating calories?Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe
Also makes me wonder what the point of the study was, if it in principle can't seem to be extrapolated to anything useful.
Member
Someone knows how to cover his ass so that he can continue to get NIH grants.
Member
His reasoning, in case anyone's interested: "The only other study similar to ours was carried out by Kirk et al (24) in 22 subjects. They showed that carbohydrate restriction reduced hepatic triglycerides more than did calorie restriction after 48 h of negative energy balance (−2% weight); however, the 2 dietary interventions were equally effective by ≈11 wk of negative energy balance (−7% weight). Most studies that have examined dietary intervention in NAFLD have focused on calorie restriction, with or without fitness training, and have typically lasted ≥3 mo (10). Within the surgical literature, several studies have examined the effect of short-term calorie restriction (≈500–800 kcal/d for 2–12 wk) on hepatic fat due to the operative difficulties encountered as a consequence of hepatomegaly and reduced intraabdominal space. Consistent with the dramatic reduction in hepatic triglycerides in our study, 80% of the reduction in liver volume occurred in the first 2 wk of calorie restriction and was maximal by 8 wk (25). Likewise, the hepatic triglyceride content was reduced by 40% after 4 wk and by 43% after 12 wk (25, 26). Taken together, these data suggest that a pool of hepatic triglycerides is rapidly mobilized during energy restriction, especially in the absence of dietary carbohydrate. The remainder appears to be mobilized more slowly; gastric bypass patients were shown to achieve postoperative reductions in hepatic triglycerides of ≈60% and ≈90% only after 6 and 12 mo, respectively (27)."
Member
Go read Taubes, "Why We Get Fat" and/or "Good Calories, Bad Calories". Both explain why it's better to use means other than manipulating calories to invoke weight loss.
Member
This is the MO of pretty much every academic researcher. Bllions of dollars of tax revenue. I think about this every once in a while when I look at my paycheck.
Member
I disagree.
Starting Strength Coach
Or...maybe, as scientists who knew they were about to be taken out of context for a press release, they were simply trying to be careful to limit their conclusions to what the data from a small, short-term study could support.
Instead of judging the work on the basis of a press release, I would rather look at the actual study, or at least the abstract:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21367948
Here are the actual conclusions:
Reading the abstract, it sounds to me like the point of the study was very specific and limited: to investigate a different approach to treating patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver, which is a clinically relevant problem. I don't have access to the full article from home (I'll try to pull it Friday), and I'll bet there are important shortcomings to the study other than its size and scope. Still, no clinical study is perfect, and it looks to me like the reported results are relevant, reasonable and worthy of further study. Scientists are on a razor's edge when it comes to interpreting their results. When they state their conclusions carefully and precisely, they're "weaseling." When they make expansive or speculative conclusions, they're accused of wild overreaching, or worse.Two weeks of dietary intervention (≈4.3% weight loss) reduced hepatic triglycerides by ≈42% in subjects with NAFLD; however, reductions were significantly greater with dietary carbohydrate restriction than with calorie restriction. This may have been due, in part, to enhanced hepatic and whole-body oxidation.
As for their press-release statement about low carb being no better than low-fat, it's hard to know whether they're talking about people in general or fatty liver patients in particular. Either way, their study doesn't say jack shit about what you and I should eat.
Oh, and by the way, those billions of dollars of research have allowed us to make painful, tiny, halting, incremental improvements in the treatment of cancer, heart failure, stroke, and divers other stubborn avatars of human misery. Yes, money gets wasted. Yes, a lot of junk gets published. Sometimes it's even harmful junk. But sometimes, once in a dozen blue moons, it's a breakthrough. More often it's just the steady production of little, unglamorous, unexciting pieces of the puzzle: vast amounts of basic, mechanistic biomedical data, of the kind that Big Pharma would never make money producing, of the kind that leads to a deeper understanding of health and disease and drives gradual deployment of new therapies to the bedside, and of the kind that Rip himself has used in his own work. It's not perfect, far from it, but it's a tiny fraction of the Federal budget and it's helped to make American medicine the most technologically advanced in the world (if not the most equitable or efficient).
Just my .02. (And I should disclose that I'm not impartial; I've been a PI on two NIH grants, although I would beg to differ with EvanJones vis-a-vis my putative "MO.")
I go now to don my asbestos lab coat.
Member
Now waitaminute.
This part is not weasely:
This part is: (weasely words starred)Dr. Browning cautioned that the findings do not explain why participants on the low-carb diet saw a greater reduction in liver fat, and that they should not be extrapolated beyond the two-week period of study.
If he was being exact and scientific then why did he feel it necessary to editorialize about things beyond the scope of this particular study? It looks a lot like CYA."This is not a long-term study, and I don't *think* that low-carb diets are fundamentally better than low-fat ones," he said. "Our approach is *likely* to be only of short-term benefit because at some point the benefits of weight loss alone trounce any benefits derived from manipulating dietary macronutrients such as calories and carbohydrates.
"Weight loss, regardless of the mechanism, is currently the most effective way to reduce liver fat."
And the last bit contradicts the results of his study. Carb restriction WAS more effective within the bounds of this study. Longer periods of time are irrelevant because it wasn't studied. If he's going to talk about other studies that support this statement then he should reference them instead of talking out his ass.
TMPHBITEU
That was the part that amused me.
Posting Permissions
