Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from February, 2009

Media Distortions and the Lastest Big Diet Study

You may have seen the buzz around the latest diet study, just published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The New York Times' article about it is quite representative of the coverage this study is getting. For people who are trying to lose weight, it does not matter if they are counting carbohydrates, protein or fat. All that matters is that they are counting something. Reading this with my morning coffee threw me into a bit of a panic, given it flies so completely in the face of my personal opinions and experiences. What if my weight loss has all been a lie? Did I really take the blue pill after all? Then I read the actual NEJM study article . Existential crisis averted. It turns out the study itself has some major flaws, serious enough that the conclusion (which the media picked up on) doesn't even really follow. Let's examine it in detail (below here, quoted sections are directly from the study). First, it wasn't even designed to address the questi