Here We Go Again: Another Meat Kills! Study - Naughton

Here We Go Again: Another Meat Kills! Study

 

Posted by Tom Naughton

You’ve got to give the anti-meat hysterics credit for their creativity. Since they can’t prove directly that eating meat will kill you, they’ve become quite adept at stringing unrelated results together into what (almost) looks like a chain of causality.

As I explained in my Big Fat Fiasco speech, this technique is referred to as teleoanalysis. In a nutshell, it works like this: we can’t prove that A causes C, but if we can find evidence that A is linked to B and B is linked to C, we’ll go ahead and declare that A causes C.

Teleoanalysis is partly what has kept the Lipid Hypothesis alive. Studies have failed over and over to prove that a high-fat diet causes heart disease – and in fact, low-fat diets have failed to reduce heart disease in clinical trials over and over. So the anti-fat hysterics trotted out a version of teleoanalysis that looks like this:

• High-fat diets (A) raise cholesterol (B)
• Raised cholesterol (B) is associated with heart disease (C)
• Therefore, a high-fat diet must cause heart disease

If this sounds logical to you, consider my own favorite version of teleoanalysis:

• Drinking lots of water (A) causes frequent urination (B)
• Frequent urination (B) is associated with diabetes (C)
• Therefore, drinking lots of water causes diabetes

With that in mind, let’s take a look at yet another Meat Kills! study that’s making a splash in the media. Here are some quotes from a BBC article online:

A chemical found in red meat helps explain why eating too much steak, mince and bacon is bad for the heart, say US scientists.

A study in the journal Nature Medicine showed that carnitine in red meat was broken down by bacteria in the gut.

This kicked off a chain of events that resulted in higher levels of cholesterol and an increased risk of heart disease.

Can you spot the teleoanalysis? Here it is:

• Red meat (A) contains carnitine, which when digested kicks off a chain of events leading to higher cholesterol (B)
• Higher cholesterol (B) is associated with heart disease (C)
• Therefore, red meat causes heart disease

Here’s the abstract for the study referenced in the BBC article:

Intestinal microbiota metabolism of choline and phosphatidylcholine produces trimethylamine (TMA), which is further metabolized to a proatherogenic species, trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO). We demonstrate here that metabolism by intestinal microbiota of dietary l-carnitine, a trimethylamine abundant in red meat, also produces TMAO and accelerates atherosclerosis in mice. Omnivorous human subjects produced more TMAO than did vegans or vegetarians following ingestion of l-carnitine through a microbiota-dependent mechanism. The presence of specific bacterial taxa in human feces was associated with both plasma TMAO concentration and dietary status. Plasma l-carnitine levels in subjects undergoing cardiac evaluation (n = 2,595) predicted increased risks for both prevalent cardiovascular disease (CVD) and incident major adverse cardiac events (myocardial infarction, stroke or death), but only among subjects with concurrently high TMAO levels. Chronic dietary l-carnitine supplementation in mice altered cecal microbial composition, markedly enhanced synthesis of TMA and TMAO, and increased atherosclerosis, but this did not occur if intestinal microbiota was concurrently suppressed. In mice with an intact intestinal microbiota, dietary supplementation with TMAO or either carnitine or choline reduced in vivo reverse cholesterol transport. Intestinal microbiota may thus contribute to the well-established link between high levels of red meat consumption and CVD risk.

Allow me to interpret that gobbledygook:

Humans who eat meat have more carnitine-eating bacteria in their guts and therefore produce more TMAO than vegetarians. TMAO is associated with heart disease. If we pump mice full of carnitine, they also produce lots of TMAO and get heart disease. So humans should cut back on meat.
More teleoanalysis. It’s just another version of this argument, which helped to establish the Lipid Hypothesis: lard raises cholesterol, and rabbits get both high cholesterol and heart disease if they’re force-fed lard, so humans shouldn’t eat lard.

The only problem is that lard consumption was plummeting while heart-disease rates were skyrocketing.

The abstract also mentions the “well-established link” between meat consumption and heart disease. Since vegetarians are often more health-conscious in general and therefore less likely to consume sodas, donuts, candy and other junk, I’d expect them to have lower rates of heart disease than meat-eaters who consume the standard western (crap-filled) diet. But is that association consistent?
As I mentioned out in another post about yet another Meat Kills! study, here’s quote from a study titled Mortality In British Vegetarians:

The mortality of both the vegetarians and the nonvegetarians in this study is low compared with national rates. Within the study, mortality from circulatory diseases and all causes is not significantly different between vegetarians and meat eaters.

And here’s the conclusion from a study titled Dietary protein and risk of ischemic heart disease in women:

Our data do not support the hypothesis that a high protein intake increases the risk of ischemic heart disease. In contrast, our findings suggest that replacing carbohydrates with protein may be associated with a lower risk of ischemic heart disease.

In that study, the women who consumed the most protein ate 16.1% more red meat than women who consumed the least protein, but had lower rates of heart disease.

No consistency, no validity.

Enjoy your steak.
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Read the complete article here.
Also read more here.

Low Cholesterol Leads to an Early Death - Evans/Naughton

Book Review: Low Cholesterol Leads to an Early Death Posted by Tom Naughton  Oct082012

 

Back in April I reviewed and recommended Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Prevent Heart Disease – Evidence from 101 Scientific Papers, a book by David Evans, who somehow manages to maintain and constantly update a huge collection of study abstracts and synopses on his Healthy Diets and Science website.

After I posted that review, David asked me if I’d write the foreword for his next book, another collection of 101 studies which suggest that low cholesterol – despite everything we’ve been told – isn’t good for us. I agreed, wrote the forward, then forgot about it until I received a copy of the new book this week. I was actually a bit surprised when I saw Foreword by Tom Naughton in the table of contents. Must be my advancing age.

Anyway, I like Low Cholesterol Leads to an Early Death — Evidence From 101 Scientific Papers for all the same reasons I like the previous one. It’s not a book you’ll sit down and read for pleasure, but it’s an excellent, easy-to-use reference to keep on your bookshelf. I frequently receive emails from readers asking me to point them to research they can wave in front of worried family or friends and say, “See? Saturated fat isn’t going to kill me, and no, I don’t need to take the @#$%ing statin the doctor is pushing on me!” (Or words that effect. ) If 101 studies won’t do the trick, nothing will.
As in the previous book, for each of the 101 studies there’s a title, a citation so you can look up the study yourself, and a brief summary with occasional commentary by Evans. Papers published in medical journals tend to have sleep-inducing titles along the lines of Low-density lipoprotein as a predictor of mortality in a cohort of elderly Scandinavian patients, so Evans provides more colorful titles that get to the point. You’ve got to love opening a book and seeing titles like these:

Heart attack survivors live longer if they have high cholesterol
Low cholesterol levels increase the risk of death from stroke, cancer and all causes
Low cholesterol levels predict death in patients with bacteria in the blood
Colon cancer deaths increase in men with low cholesterol

Many of these studies (and there are many of them) have been around for decades. I doubt most doctors have ever read the studies or even heard of them. If they had, I don’t see how they could possibly believe prescribing statins to beat down an elderly patient’s “high” cholesterol is a good idea. As Evans writes in the book’s introduction:

The “high cholesterol is bad for your health” myth has survived for five or six decades. The myth is why health-care practitioners, media advertisements and family and friends keep pressing home the message we should lower our cholesterol. The myth is why, despite mounting scientific evidence showing the opposite, we are still advised to lower our cholesterol. The myth is why we are told we should eat tasteless, manufactured low-fat products to lower our cholesterol. The myth is why millions of healthy people are subjected to statins drugs (and their many side effects) that will lower our cholesterol.

The myth survives largely because the millions of people buying cholesterol-lowering cereals and swallowing cholesterol-lowering drugs represent billions of dollars in revenues. We can’t change that. But we can arm ourselves with evidence and hope to convince a few loved ones that lowering our cholesterol isn’t necessary or even a good idea.

If you’re arming yourself, this book is a great addition to your arsenal.
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Read the complete article here.

Book Review: Don’t Die Early - Rocky Angelucci (Naughton reviewed)

Sep062012

Book Review: Don’t Die Early

Posted by Tom Naughton

Lying on the gurney in the emergency room, I shielded my eyes from the glaring overhead lights and tried to remember exactly when my heart went wacko. I remember being anxious and out of sorts all evening. Looking back, I realized that during dinner my chest felt fluttery and strange inside, and I recall snapping at my wife, Laura, over nothing as I left the kitchen to go upstairs.

By the time I reached the top of the stairs, I knew something was very wrong— I could barely breathe and when I placed my fingers to the side of my neck, my pulse felt very unusual. Not the rhythmic beating I would have expected, but more like an indistinct, squishy fluttering. Walking into our spare bedroom, I retrieved the pulse meter from the shelf next to the treadmill. I slipped the meter on my finger and looked at the readout. The effort seemed exhausting. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I called for Laura. When she arrived a moment later, I handed her the pulse meter.

The display read 195 beats per minute and I knew my life had just changed forever. The old carefree way of taking care of my body that had worked fine in my youth and young adulthood wasn’t working anymore. I now had to become a conscious advocate of my own health.

That’s the opening from Don’t Die Early, an educational and very well-written book by Rocky Angelucci – who did nearly die early. Finding yourself lying on a gurney should certainly put a scare into you, but unfortunately many people respond to that scare by following their well-meaning doctor’s orders … you know, cut back on the eggs and saturated fats, eat your hearthealthywholegrains, etc.

Rocky didn’t go that route, partly (and I’m delighted to say this) because of Fat Head. As he explained in an email some months ago:

I have been a fan of yours since discovering a snippet of Fat Head on YouTube the evening I returned home from the hospital following a life-changing episode of atrial fibrillation. I was only 45 years old at the time, but had just been rudely awakened by the realization that the carefree lifestyle of my youth had become increasingly harmful. Fat Head’s discussion of insulin resistance and fat storage resonated very well with my pre-med college days studying life sciences and my experiences with the Zone diet and the hormonal implications of foods. Fat Head also catalyzed my growing displeasure at a procedure-driven medical system and gave substance to my vague feeling that politics, not science, has infiltrated medical care.

Because my underlying cardiac problem ultimately turned out to be an alarming plaque burden, my research quickly lead me to Dr. William Davis’ Track Your Plaque forum, where I have been a very active member for the past two years. I became so impressed with Dr. Davis that he has been my cardiologist for the past year. His warmth and prevention-minded attitude makes the journey from Dallas to Wisconsin entirely worthwhile. Thanks to my radical lifestyle changes, most of them flying in the face of conventional wisdom, I’m fortunate to be one of the TYP members who has shown dramatic plaque reversal, recently showing a 24% six-month decrease immediately following a horrific 83% increase the year before.

If I had heart disease, there’s no one in the world I’d rather have treating me than Dr. Davis. Rocky’s in good hands.

His email continued:
Emboldened by a background as a technical writer in the fields of software, nanotechnology, and medical devices, I’ve spent the past year writing a book on preventive health that captures what I’ve learned and applied to my own condition.

I read the book before it was published and again last week, and it’s excellent. When I consider recommending a book (publishers send me books I don’t recommend, by the way), I ask myself two questions: 1) Is the information useful to people who want to lose weight or become healthier? 2) Does it pass my “Aunt Martha” test … that is, could your Aunt Martha read it and understand it?
The answer to both questions in this case is an enthusiastic yes. Rocky has a gift for taking the science of nutrition and health and explaining it clearly, and it’s obvious from the many topics he covers and how well he covers them that he jumped into that science head-first. I learned more from this book than I thought I would, which is always a pleasure.

As the title indicates, Don’t Die Early isn’t about weight loss. It’s about how to live to a ripe old age and remain healthy along the way. Weight loss is covered in a section about dietary fallacies, but Rocky’s goals for the reader are the same goals he set for himself: 1) understand the true causes of heart disease, diabetes and inflammation; 2) learn how to reliably measure and track the instigators or markers of those diseases, such as LDL particle size and A1C; and 3) take specific actions to reverse disease or prevent it from developing in the first place.

That’s what Rocky did, and was rewarded with excellent results:
In the first six months after embracing a preventive lifestyle, I accomplished the following:

• Lowered my body fat percentage from 20% to 11%
• Lowered my inflammatory markers by as much as 75% (you’ll learn about inflammation later)
• Reduced my triglycerides by more than 90% (this happened in the first 30 days)
• Improved every measurable aspect of my cholesterol
• Improved my fasting glucose by 25%
• Improved my muscle tone and stamina
• Lowered my blood pressure from an average of 145/90 to an average of 115/70
• Reduced my resting heart rate by more than 13 points

As impressive as these results might appear, I’m not revealing them so that you’ll invite me to your next party. They are to show you what is very attainable for anyone who makes the proper lifestyle changes.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One, titled The Major Players, provides in-depth explanations of heart disease, diabetes and inflammation. The message Rocky pounds home in these chapters is that it’s important not only to understand what these diseases actually are and what causes them, but to know specifically what to measure so you can tell if you’re developing them. Sadly (but not surprisingly), the tests your doctor orders often add up to too little, too late:

Imagine having the following conversation with your child’s teacher:

You: How is my daughter doing in school this semester? Is she learning the required material?

Teacher: Based upon her age, and what we infer her socioeconomic status to be, as well as her assertions that she does homework on a regular basis, we believe she has a very high likelihood of having mastered this semester’s materials acceptably.

You: Excuse me? What does this mean? Have you tested her on the material?

Teacher: No, we compared her socioeconomic status, apparent nutritional health, and her testimony that she does her homework regularly to a statistical model we have and there’s a strong correlation between your daughter’s parameters and students who mastered the coursework. Oh, and we measured the callouses on her writing fingers and they indicate that she’s likely doing quite a bit of writing, which our statistical model shows increases by 22% her chances of having mastered the material. Overall, we feel very confident that she has mastered this semester’s material.

You: I don’t understand why you’re comparing her to a statistical model instead of testing her. Do you ever plan on testing her?

Teacher: Only if she shows clear signs of having failed to master the material would we test her. As long as her parameters correlate acceptably to the statistical models of a successful population, we will assume that she is mastering the material.

Does this sound like a school you would like your child to attend? Does estimating your child’s performance by comparing indirect parameters to a statistical model sound like an ideal way to gauge her mastery of the subject matter? It certainly doesn’t to me.

Yet this is how our medical culture typically measures the risk of coronary artery disease during routine preventive exams.

That’s why Rocky didn’t know he was developing plaque in his arteries. He quotes Dr. William Davis, who says that the traditional methods of identifying people at risk for heart disease miss 90 percent of the people who eventually have a heart attack. If you want to know if you’re developing plaque, you should (surprise!) measure plaque.

The standard test for measuring diabetes often misses those who are developing it as well:
Many of the clinical guidelines in use today encourage a physician to use fasting glucose as the sole indicator of one’s diabetic health. Seeing a fasting glucose level within the laboratory “normal” range, both patient and physician are satisfied that the patient is at low risk of Type 2 diabetes.

Now that you know more about how diabetes progresses, you can see that gauging the risk of Type 2 diabetes solely on fasting glucose is terribly ineffective. An abnormal fasting glucose is typically the last commonly used indicator to show the presence of diabetes. In fact, by the time your fasting glucose is no longer in the normal range, you are already diabetic.

Throughout these chapters, Rocky explains which health markers you should be actually measuring and which specific tests you can request from your doctor or order online and perform at home.
Fat Head fans will be familiar with much of material on heart disease and diabetes, including how much of the standard advice from so-called experts is wrong. But even though I’ve read quite a bit on those topics, I kept coming across information in Don’t Die Early that was either new to me or struck me as particularly well-explained. Here are a couple of sample bits:

Perhaps the biggest problem with insulin being a growth hormone is that not all of the tissues in the body become desensitized to increasing levels of insulin at the same rate. As a person becomes more and more insulin-resistant, cells that are much less affected continue to respond to the ever-increasing levels of insulin, growing and multiplying more rapidly as insulin levels increase. What cells exhibit this behavior? The endothelial cells that form the lining of your arteries, for one. As these arterial cells multiply more rapidly, the lining of an insulin-resistant person’s arteries thicken and grow inward, hastening coronary artery disease. This is one of the reasons why so many diabetics die from heart disease.
…
A typical cell membrane is composed of a lipid bilayer, which is just what it sounds like: two layers of fatty acid molecules, sandwiched together to give cell membranes their much-needed strength. This bilayer also forms an effective barrier to foreign substances, through the use of embedded receptors that are designed to transfer only specific things into and out of the cell. The impermeable lipid layers and their receptors serve as gatekeepers to help ensure the health of a cell by transferring only what the cell needs, in the right amounts, into the cell and removing unwanted substances from within the cell. Virtually anything that the cell consumes or produces is transported this way, ensuring that only the proper substances ever reach the interior of the cell.

As with most structures of the body, the cell’s lipid bilayer needs to be constantly maintained, which the body does by constantly replenishing the crucial fatty acids that comprise the cell membranes. What happens if a person eats a trivial amount of healthy omega-3 fatty acids and an abundance of unhealthy omega-6 fatty acid? Simple, the body does its best with what you give it and will use the omega-6 fatty acids instead.

What this means is that in addition to their role in promoting inflammatory chemical messengers, omega-6 fatty acids become incorporated into virtually every cell in your body.

Part two of the book, Lifestyle Changes, includes chapters on dietary truths and fallacies, setting goals, and taking action. Again, the chapter on diet covers ground that’s largely familiar for Fat Heads (Gary Taubes and Dr. William Davis are quoted several times), but it’s well written and worth the read.

In the final two chapters, Rocky urges the reader to do enough testing to establish several baseline measurements (blood sugar, fasting insulin, vitamin D concentration, LDL particle size, etc.), set specific and attainable goals for improving those markers, then work to meet them. If you’ve ever wondered what your fasting insulin level or vitamin D concentration should be (ideally, anyway) this chapter will tell you. Rocky also gives advice on how to improve your odds of meeting each goal. For example, to achieve optimum triglyceride levels:

In summary, the best approach to reducing one’s triglycerides is

• Eliminate grains, replacing them with vegetables, nuts, and berries.
• Minimize carbohydrates (especially fructose), eating them in sufficient moderation so as to never cause unfavorable glucose levels.
• Consider supplementing your diet with omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil.
• Speak to your physician about supplementing with niacin to help optimize your triglycerides.
• All of the above steps will very effectively control your fasting triglycerides. To really take it to the next level, buy a Cardio-Chek triglyceride meter to measure your body’s response to different types of meals to identify exactly how sensitive your body is to specific types and quantities of fats. If you perform a small series of these carefully controlled tests, you’ll have infinitely more clarity on how to optimize your diet for the best possible postprandial triglyceride production (this will be especially valuable in determining whether saturated fat is good for you and at what level).

Near the very end of the book, there’s a section I’m sure many of you will relate to … the sub-chapter heading is Prepare To Be An Outcast. Here’s chunk of that section:

You may find yourself biting your tongue every time you see a friend, colleague, or loved one wolf down a low-fat, grain-based meal, laden with vegetable oil, as they complain about having acid reflux or autoimmune disorders.

You may see friends and loved ones struggle with weight problems while they eat low-fat foods that constantly elevate their blood glucose level, ensuring that they live life as the “walking starving,” trying unsuccessfully to lose weight.

Even your more health-conscious friends may not appreciate your one-upping them on matters of health and nutrition. Responding to their enthusiasm for fish oil with “Yes, but do you track your daily intake of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and have you ever checked your Omega-3 Index?” will make you sound like a know-it-all.

It’s painful to realize that some people just don’t want to hear that there’s a better future available to them if they just abandon the current thinking on what’s healthy and what’s not. Many refuse to believe that they could ever get bad advice from a physician or from a “trusted” source like the USDA, the American Dietetic Association, or the American Diabetes Association. In such cases, you may just need to silently watch them continue on their path.

Sadly, that’s true. But for people who are open to trying a new path to health, Don’t Die Early is an excellent guidebook.
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Read the full article here.

Cholesterol Good; Statins Bad - Naughton

Cholesterol Good; Statins Bad

Tom Naughton podcast on The Lew Rockwell Show

Filmmaker, comedian Tom Naughton talks to Lew Rockwell about ignoring government food advice.

The Anti-Egg Bad Scientist Strikes Again - Naughton

The Anti-Egg Bad Scientist Strikes Again

Posted by Tom Naughton

I lost count of how many people sent me emails or posted comments about the latest Eggs Will Kill You! study. Here are a couple of sample headlines and lead paragraphs:
No yolk: eating the whole egg as dangerous as smoking?

Just as you were ready to tuck into a nice three-egg omelet again, comforted by the reassuring news that eggs are not so bad for you, here comes a study warning that for those over 40, the number of egg yolks consumed per week accelerates the thickening of arteries almost as severely as does cigarette smoking. Server, can you make that an egg-white omelet instead, please?

Egg yolks almost as unhealthy as cigarettes: Study

Yolk or smoke — the first is almost as bad for you as the second, London researchers have found.
Egg yolks accelerate the thickening of arteries? As in cause and effect? Was this a carefully controlled clinical trial?

Of course not. It was yet another observational study based on a food questionnaire, as the LA Times article explains.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Atherosclerosis, measured the carotid wall thickness — a key indicator of heart disease risk — of 1,231 patients referred to a vascular prevention clinic, and asked each to detail a wide range of their health habits, from smoking and exercise to their consumption of egg yolks. Just as smoking is often tallied as “pack-years” (the number of cigarette packs smoked per day for how many years), egg-yolk consumption was tallied as “egg yolk years” (the number of egg yolks consumed per week times the number of years they were eaten).
So what we’re looking at here is a group people who were referred to a heart-disease clinic – hardly a random sampling of the population – and a measure of their plaque levels compared to their answers on a questionnaire about their dietary habits. Here’s what you can reasonably conclude about cause and effect from a study like this:

[nothing]

But of course, that’s not how our intrepid media reporters interpreted it:
Smoking tobacco and eating egg yolks increased carotid wall thickness in similar fashion — which is to say, the rate of increase accelerated with each stair-step up in cigarette smoking or yolk consumption.

Eating yolks triggered plaque build-up at two thirds the rate for people who are smokers.
It would be bad enough if we were just witnessing the usual media misinterpretation of an observational study. But in this case, the lead (ahem) researcher has been aiding and abetting that misinterpretation. Here are some quotes from his university’s own press release:
Newly published research led by Western’s Dr. David Spence shows that eating egg yolks accelerates atherosclerosis in a manner similar to smoking cigarettes.

No, you dimwits, Dr. Spence found a correlation. That’s all.

“The mantra ‘eggs can be part of a healthy diet for healthy people’ has confused the issue. It has been known for a long time that a high cholesterol intake increases the risk of cardiovascular events, and egg yolks have a very high cholesterol content. In diabetics, an egg a day increases coronary risk by two to five-fold,” said Spence, a professor of Neurology at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and the director of its Stroke Prevention and Atherosclerosis Research Centre at the Robarts Research Institute.

Dr. Spence, even Ancel Keys admitted that the amount of cholesterol we consume in our diets has no effect on the cholesterol levels in our blood. How exactly does consuming cholesterol cause heart disease? What’s the biological mechanism?

As for his statement an egg per day increases coronary risk in diabetics, I dealt with that lousy study in a previous post.

“What we have shown is that with aging, plaque builds up gradually in the arteries of Canadians, and egg yolks make it build up faster – about two-thirds as much as smoking. In the long haul, egg yolks are not okay for most Canadians.”

No, Dr. Spence, you haven’t shown that eggs make it build up faster. You can’t possibly show any such cause and effect by conducting an observational study.

Spence added the effect of egg yolk consumption over time on increasing the amount of plaque in the arteries was independent of sex, cholesterol, blood pressure, smoking, body mass index and diabetes.
Excuse me, but did I just read that the artery-clogging effects of eggs were independent of cholesterol?!! The whole reason Dr. Spence has been warning us against consuming eggs is that they contain too much cholesterol. So is cholesterol the bad guy here or not?

Let me see if I can follow the logic so far: eating eggs doesn’t raise cholesterol levels in our bloodstreams, cholesterol was not a determining factor for plaque buildup in this study, but Dr. Spence doesn’t want us to eat eggs yolks because (as he’s been busy explaining to the media), eggs contain more than the recommended amounts of cholesterol.

Okay, got it.

Here’s another of my favorite bad-science interpretations of the study:
The cholesterol in delicious egg yolks accelerates atherosclerosis (the build-up of plaque in our arteries) almost as much as smoking.

Once again, that sure sounds like cause and effect to me.

That sentence came from The Atlantic … which is a bit ironic, since the same magazine had the good sense last year to publish an excellent article titled Lies, Damned Lies and Medical Science. Perhaps whoever wrote the sentence above should read that article, which describes how Dr. John Ionnidis — an M.D. and mathematical genius who has spent years studying studies – has been exposing bad science in the health and medical fields. Here are some quotes:
He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat — is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.
When it came to cancer, heart disease, and other common ailments, there was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations.

Good scientists don’t jump to conclusions based on observational studies, and with good reason: as I mentioned in my Science For Smart People speech, Dr. Ionnidis determined that 80 percent of the conclusions drawn from observational studies have turned out to be wrong. Yup, 80 percent. Here’s more from the article:
Consider, he says, the endless stream of results from nutritional studies in which researchers follow thousands of people for some number of years, tracking what they eat and what supplements they take, and how their health changes over the course of the study …

For starters, he explains, the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up.

Apparently in combing through his long, random strings of letters, Dr. Spence found the message Eggs Yolks Will Clog Your Arteries! – followed by another one that read: Forget What Real Scientists Believe – Correlation Does Too Prove Causation!

I don’t have a copy of the full study (and I’m not paying $32 to buy one), but Zoe Harcombe has one and wrote a spot-on analysis. One interesting bit of data she pulled from the study is that the people who ate the most eggs (or had the most “yolk years” under their belts) also had the lowest total cholesterol levels. Hmmm … once again I have to ask myself how these killer eggs yolks are clogging Canadian arteries if not through cholesterol.

She also noticed that even in the highest quintile of “egg yolks years,” the people surveyed were consuming an average of 4.68 eggs per week. According to a USDA table I downloaded, Americans in the 1920s consumed between 6 and 7 eggs per week on average. I guess that explains the sky-high rate of heart disease in the 1920s.

So what’s going on with this study? Why did Dr. Spence find a correlation? As Dr. Ionnidis points out in the Atlantic article, researchers have a way of finding the results they want to find. But let’s suppose this was a totally unbiased analysis and the correlation between “egg yolk years” and plaque buildup is really and truly right there in the data. Does that prove egg yolks cause plaque?
Nope.

As I’ve said before, if I could get the media to go along and convince everyone that celery will clog your arteries, in a decade or two we could conduct an observational study and find that – lo and behold – people who ate more celery had more heart disease. The reason we’d find that correlation is that health-conscious people would be avoiding celery, while the “I don’t give a @#$%” people wouldn’t.

We saw that effect (in reverse, anyway) with the estrogen pill fiasco. A large observational study showed that women who took estrogen pills had a 40% lower rate of heart disease. But in two large clinical trials (the kind that matter), women who took estrogen pills ended up with higher rates of both heart disease and strokes. The estrogen pills weren’t protecting women’s hearts, but health-conscious women were more likely to take estrogen pills. Health-conscious people routinely gravitate towards what they’re told is good for them and avoid what they’re told is bad for them. In doing so, they can create all kind of correlations that have nothing to do with cause and effect.
I know that, even Dr. Spence doesn’t.

We’ve been told for 35 years now that eggs yolks are bad for us. So who is going to eat fewer eggs? Health-conscious people. The “I don’t give a @#$%” types will eat more – probably with a couple of pieces of white-bread toast.

My advice to the Canadians (and anyone else who wants to avoid heart disease) is to enjoy your eggs but dump all the sugar, wheat and other refined carbohydrates from your diet.

I had four egg yolks today, courtesy of our chickens. I had three yesterday and four on Tuesday. I’ll eat more eggs tomorrow. In “egg yolk years,” I’m probably coming up on my 237th birthday. And I’m not the least bit worried about it.
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Read the full article here.

Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Prevent Heart Disease – Evidence from 101 Scientific Papers - Evans

Book Review: Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Prevent Heart Disease

Posted by Tom Naughton

I receive a fair number of emails and comments from people urging me to add a section to the blog that lists studies supporting a low-carb diet. Yes, that would be a worthy project, but it’s not one I’ll have time to tackle anytime soon.

However, I’ve frequently referred people to David Evans’ Healthy Diets and Science website, which is basically a compilation of health and nutrition study abstracts, conveniently indexed by topic in the right sidebar. I don’t know where he manages to dig up all these abstracts, but there are nearly a thousand of them, spanning decades of research.

I’m pleased to announce that Evans has recently published a book with the provocative title Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Prevent Heart Disease – Evidence from 101 Scientific Papers. The content is exactly what the title promises: a list of 101 studies that dispute the hypothesis that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, with quite a few of them suggesting that saturated fat and cholesterol are, in fact, good for us. For each study, there’s a title, a citation and a brief summary (with occasional commentary) by Evans.

Here are just a few example titles:

Diets high in carbohydrates which have a high glycemic load increase heart disease risk by 98%.

Vegetable oils implicated in increased death rates.

A high saturated fat diet gives protection from heart disease.

These are the studies you don’t often read about in the media, and of course they’re also the studies most doctors have never heard of, much less actually read. Many of them are observational studies, and I’ve pounded home the point over and over that observational studies don’t prove anything. So does that make these studies worthless as evidence?

Not at all.

As I explained in my Science For Smart People speech, if someone spots a correlation between A and B in an observational study and proposes that A causes B, one of the questions we should ask ourselves is whether or not we see a link between A and B consistently. If we don’t, it’s highly unlikely that A is causing B.

The example I gave in the speech was the observation that people who live near power lines have higher rates of cancer. Naturally, plenty of journalists and ambulance-chasing lawyers immediately concluded that power lines cause cancer. More cautious types pointed out that poor people are more likely to live near power lines, and poor people have higher rates of cancer for all kinds of reasons.

What finally put the power-line scare to rest was another observational study that found a completely opposite correlation: people who work on power lines for a living – and are therefore consistently exposed to more electrical current than people who merely live near power lines – have lower rates of cancer than the population as a whole. If proximity to power lines caused cancer, the people who work on them would have high rates of cancer. But they don’t. No consistency, no scientific validity, no cause and effect.

The same principle applies to observational studies about dietary fat and heart disease. If several observational studies show that people who eat a lot of saturated fat have higher rates of heart disease, but several other observational studies show that people who eat a lot of saturated fat have lower rates of heart disease, then it’s extremely unlikely that saturated fat causes heart disease. That’s the value of observational studies as evidence: they’re better at disproving a hypothesis than they are at proving one.

There are plenty of clinical studies cited in the book as well, and you can already guess what the evidence Evans has compiled shows: it’s not the fat in our diets that causes heart disease; it’s the sugars, refined carbohydrates, processed vegetables oils and other garbage.

For those of you who’ve written to me asking for evidence you can cite in a lecture or class paper, this is a book you need in your library. For those of you who’ve written asking for evidence that will convince your loved ones your high-fat diet isn’t going to kill you, ditto. For those of you who’ve written to tell me Fat Head is an irresponsible and dangerous film that will inspire people to eat high-fat diets and die of heart disease … well, never mind. Nothing’s going to convince you anyway.
But for those of you who are interested in the actual science, this is a great little reference.
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Read the complete review of David Evans' book "Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Prevent Heart Disease – Evidence from 101 Scientific Papers" by Tom Naughton here.

Still More Bad News For Statins - Naughton

Still More Bad News For Statins

Posted by Tom Naughton in Bad Medicine

As if we didn’t already know …
A newly-published study highlights one of the nasty side-effects of statins:
The popular cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins might take a toll on people’s energy levels, a new study suggests.

Researchers say the potential side effect, which has yet to be confirmed by other experiments, is a particular concern for women. They estimate that out of 10 women taking Merck’s Zocor, also called simvastatin, four would have less energy or feel more tired during exercise due to the drug.

Well, that’s the thing: when a drug destroys the mitochondria in your muscles, you tend to feel a bit fatigued while exercising. Doing the same work with a weaker muscle means the muscle will wear out sooner.

As I wrote in a post last year, athletes are particularly quick to notice the loss of strength caused by statins and to stop taking them. No surprise there, since for a professional athlete, a small change in athletic performance can mean the difference between being a millionaire or a has-been. For people whose most strenuous activity is walking from the parking lot to the office doors, the damage could go undetected for a long time.

Dr. Beatrice Golomb, who led the new research, told Reuters Health that many patients experience fatigue after starting on a statin, but that the evidence until now has been limited to observations.
We’ve met Dr. Golomb before. She’s been tracking the effects of statins for years and gave an outstanding (if a bit hard to follow because she speaks so quickly) lecture on how pharmaceutical companies have corrupted medical science that I embedded in a previous post.

Statins are generally thought to be safe drugs, but may cause muscle and joint pain in some patients.
Statins are generally thought to be safe because doctors are generally misinformed about the side effects and don’t generally spot and report them. As I’ve mentioned before, my mom suffered muscle and joint pain on statins. Her doctor never made the connection and (of course) prescribed pain pills to cover the effects.

Dr. Franz Messerli, who runs the hypertension program at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York and was not involved in the research, said the new findings were concerning and not unexpected given statins’ effect on muscle tissue.

But another expert cautioned that the study had some limitations and said patients shouldn’t stop taking their medication before talking to a doctor.

Gosh yes, talk to your generally misinformed doctor before dumping a medication you don’t need in the first place. That way your doctor can say, “But it makes me feel good about myself when your cholesterol score goes down, so I’d urge you to keep taking the drugs.”

“Fatigue is reversible and not fatal,” Dr. Kausik Ray told Reuters Health by email. “Risks and benefits in absolute terms should be discussed on a case by case basis.”

What the @#$% makes Dr. Ray so sure the fatigue is reversible? According to Dr. Duane Graveline, who has been studying statin side-effects for years, the damage to the mitochondria can be permanent — as it was in his case.

And are we really going to tell people it’s okay to be fatigued for the rest of their lives as long as the effect isn’t fatal?!

“I have good news and bad news, Ms. Smith.”
“What’s the bad news, Doctor?”
“You’ll probably feel tired and sore for the rest of your life.”
“What’s the good news?”
“You can live a long, long time feeling tired and sore.”

Ray, who studies heart disease prevention at St. George’s University of London, added that in his experience fatigue is not a common problem with statins.

My mom’s doctor would probably make the same statement, since she didn’t connect the muscle pain and fatigue to the statins.

But Golomb, of the University of California, San Diego, countered that doctors often fail to make the link between fatigue and statin use in their patients. “Often it doesn’t show up right away so physicians may not recognize the effect,” she told Reuters Health.

Like I said …
Neither Merck nor Bristol-Myers Squibb could provide comments on the findings, which are published in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Don’t be silly. Of course they could provide comment. They chose not to, for obvious reasons.

Studies have found that in people without heart disease the benefits of statins are very small at best. As a result, Golomb said, it’s worth considering potential side effects such as fatigue before taking the drugs.

Yes, pretty please, consider the potential side-effects: muscle damage, joint pain, cognitive impairment, diabetes, liver damage, and loss of sex drive, to name just a few.

Then tell your doctor no, you won’t be taking statins.
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Read the full article by Tom Naughton here.

Evidence based medicine

Following quoted from Chris Kresser.
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The myth of evidence-based medicine

I was talking with a colleague the other day (let’s call her M). M related a story one of her patients told her. This patient is a nurse at Kaiser. The nurse was telling M about a meeting she recently attended with the rest of the clinical staff at Kaiser. The purpose of the meeting was to inform all of the doctors and nurses about new clinical guidelines for preventing heart disease.

And what were these clinicians told? To encourage their patients to eat fewer refined carbs, less vegetable oil and less sugar? To engage in a stress management program? To get a moderate amount of physical activity?

Hardly. They were told, in a nutshell, to give everyone statins. The idea communicated to them was that statins are “like vitamins” (a direct quote), and should be distributed in a similar manner.
This got me thinking about the concept of “evidence-based medicine”. I’m all for it, by the way. Evidence-based medicine, that is. The problem is that it doesn’t really exist in the conventional medical model.

Actually, I take that back. It does exist. But to be more accurate we’d have to call it “20-or-30-year-old-evidence-based medicine”. That’s a more representative term for the kind of medicine being practiced today.

The story above is a perfect case in point. The evidence is clear that statins don’t work. (If you don’t believe that, watch this presentation.) Furthermore, the evidence is also clear that the low-fat, high carbohydrate, vegetable oil-fueled diet promoted for decades by the American Heart Association (AHA) has not only failed to prevent heart disease, it has promoted it.

Anyone who actually reads the scientific literature with an open mind and a critical eye could reach these conclusions. The studies aren’t top secret. They’re not kept in an underground fortress. They’re readily available online or at your local medical library.

Yet in spite of the overwhelming evidence against statins and the low-fat AHA diet, this is still the standard of care for heart disease in the medical profession.

I wish I could say this is an isolated case. But you see the same thing in just about every disease or health condition. The standard of care for hypothyroidism is a complete joke. (More on this after I pass my licensing exam, I promise!) Type II diabetes can, for the vast majority of people, be managed and prevented by a low-carb diet. GERD is treated with PPIs and acid stopping drugs, in spite of the evidence that it is actually caused by low stomach acid in most cases.

Maybe the best example, though, is the 2010 dietary guidelines recently published by the USDA. Tom Naughton over at Fat Head published a post on this recently, so I’ll just crib from that:

I started reading the USDA’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines this week. For those of you who hoped the federal government would finally wise up and dump the high-carb/low-fat nonsense … come on, you didn’t really expect that, did you?

Did you honestly believe the government would put together a panel of so-called experts who would announce that the government has been wrong for the past 40 years? That the food pyramid was a disaster? That billions of taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the same foods that are making us fat and diabetic?

Of course not. The new guidelines are, if anything, a perfect example of something I’ve said in previous posts (which I believe I may have borrowed from Milton Friedman): when a government program produces disastrous results, those results are offered as proof that we need to do the same thing again … only bigger!

That’s mostly what the new guidelines are: the same old $#@%, only bigger. Bigger reductions in saturated fat, bigger reductions in salt, bigger reductions in cholesterol, and of course (this is a government committee, after all) lots of “calls to action” … otherwise known as BIG federal programs to convince us poor fools in the public to finally start heeding their advice.

Everywhere you look, you see medicine that isn’t evidence-based – or medicine that’s based on evidence that’s ten, twenty and even fifty years old.

The truth is we don’t have evidence-based medicine. We have profit-based medicine. And as long as the insurance and pharmaceutical companies are running the show, that’s what we’ll continue to have.

Did you know Big Pharma is the second-most profitable industry in the world, behind only the oil industry? Did you know that these companies fund 2/3 of all medical research? Do you really think honest-to-goodness evidence-based medicine is even a possibility in this environment?

Luckily we’ve got the Internet, and some conscientious and intelligent researchers and medical professionals that are willing to look beneath the veil and share what they find with the rest of us.

These days that’s really our only hope as people trying to live healthy lives: to be our own advocates, to seek out information that comes from people without a vested financial interest in selling you something, to maintain a “healthy skepticism” (if I may use the term) about any claims made, whether they come from the conventional or alternative world.

Because let’s face it, evidence-based medicine is a myth.
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Read the full article here.

Tom Naughton's talk to Office of Research Integrity

From Dr John Briffa's blog watch this 20 minute presentation by Tom Naughton. Tom hits another bull's Eye! And, "Yes he does mention heart disease!"


Tom says     "Doctors, nutritionists, researchers, medical industry trade groups, government agencies and other established authorities handing out dietary advice that flat-out doesn’t work very well for an awful lot of people."

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Dr John Briffa says....

Tom Naughton owns the nutritional establishment and give us hope for the future in just 20 minutes

Tom recently gave a 20-minute talk in Washington DC in which he gives a (I think) great summary of the dunderheaded dietary advice given to us by government agencies, health groups and most health professionals. He also highlights the fact that people are increasingly looking for help on-line, and finding it in the form of blogs and within social media. He makes the point that getting information this way can be better and more useful than taking, say, one piece of advice from a so-called ‘expert’ who just so happens to have it all wrong. He’s right.

Tom’s presentation gives us cause for optimism. He seems to be rightly aware that people appear to be turning away from conventional sources of information in their droves, and that people are increasingly looking for genuinely helpful dietary advice in all the right places. If I had 20 minutes to say what I feel is wrong with conventional dietetic advice and where people would be better off looking for useful (and science-based) information and advice, I hope it would come out a lot like Tom’s talk.

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See Tom's own site here.

The David Korech of Medicine?

Tom Naughton's critical review of a critical review that must have been so off base, mis-leading, false etc. that the powers that be have removed it from the shelves.

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The Long Knives Are Out For ‘Wheat Belly’

from Fat Head by Tom Naughton

Look as if the grain-industry people have been trolling the internet attempting to trash Wheat Belly, the outstanding new book by Dr. William Davis. How else do you explain an Amazon review written under the title The David Korech of Medicine. Notice that the review doesn’t dispute any of the facts or science presented in Wheat Belly:
The author has no credentials, no credibility, just a small cult of terriby misinformed followers. Don’t be fooled by the high volume screech against wheat and grains.
I have to admit, it didn’t occur to me when I recommended Wheat Belly that Dr. Davis has no credentials. I assumed being a doctor who’s seen the benefits of a wheat-free diet in thousands of his own patients counted for something. I also figured that after poring over hundreds of studies on wheat’s health effects and thoroughly researching the history and genetic structure of wheat, Dr. Davis was qualified to write on the topic.
Allegations of “secret ingredients in wheat” to make you eat more, or comparisons to cigerettes. Seriously?!
Apparently the wheat lobby doesn’t require its job applicants to pass a spelling test. Are cigerettes similar to cigarettes?
Dr. Davis never claimed there are secret ingredients in wheat. He didn’t (as far as I know) don a Ninja costume or disguise himself as a plumber and break into the headquarters of Wheat , Inc. to pilfer documents. He simply described, based on published documents, how wheat has been modified during the past 50 years.
For over 8000 years wheat has sustained and grown human kind …
Eight-thousand years ago, humans (some of them, anyway) consumed Einkorn wheat. The main similarity between Einkorn wheat and today’s mutant wheat is they’re both called “wheat.” We also call both Thomas Jefferson and Adolph Hitler “humans,” but they produced rather different effects on other humans. What we ate 8,000 years ago has nothing to with the health consequences of eating a highly modified variety of wheat that’s only been around for the past 50 years.
And wheat didn’t “grow” humankind. Wheat shrunk humankind.

… oh and it tastes good when mixed with a little water and yeast.
That explains why nearly every brand of bread includes high fructose corn syrup high on the list of ingredients.
Every nutritionist and serious medical professional will tell you that bread is the most economical and safe source of essential nutrients.

Every one, seriously? That’s odd … I seem to recall a lot of conversations and interviews with nutritionists and medical professionals who agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Davis — who, despite having a good sense of humor, is a serious medical professional. So serious that he wrote a book about wheat.

In fact, bread is handed out in natural disasters because it sustains life without food safety issues or requiring refrigeration.

Tell ya what: if I’m ever starving because a tornado wiped out all the refrigerators within a 50-mile radius, I’ll eat some of the bread FEMA hands out. But the fact that bread doesn’t require refrigeration doesn’t in any way prove it’s good for us. Coca-Cola and heroin don’t require refrigeration either.
And now, suddenly it will kill you. Comical!
No, today’s mutant wheat doesn’t kill you suddenly. It’s more like slow torture.
This book is such a bone headed, misinformed way to just scare people into not eating.
Now wait a minute, Buster! Dr. Davis is 100% in favor of people eating. He just doesn’t want them eating a mutant grain product that will make them fat and sick.
As for secret ingredients, humm, apparently the author is ignorant of the food laws that regulate everything that goes into food and on food labels. Unlike some enforcement agencies, the FDA has some serious teeth behind its enforcement.
Well, that certainly negates all the studies demonstrating the negative effects of wheat that Dr. Davis cited in Wheat Belly. If the USDA and FDA are on the beat, mutant wheat (which is heavily subsidized by the same government that funds the USDA and FDA) simply has to be safe. That’s why they conducted all those tests on the stuff to make sure it wouldn’t cause any … no, wait a minute. Nobody ever conducted tests on mutant wheat to see if it’s fit for human consumption. Okay then, we’ll just have faith the USDA and FDA can tell if a food product is safe by looking at it. That works for me.
As for frankenwheat, again seriously?! Wheat, due to its ubiquitous presence in the world is treated as sacrosant from any GMO research or development.
I see. So when wheat went from being a wispy plant that couldn’t be harvested until it was five feet tall to a short, stubby little plant that’s harvested when it’s two feet tall — all in just the past 50 years – that was a natural mutation, was it? Boy, evolution works really, really fast. I wonder what all those plant geneticists on the Monsanto payroll are doing all day. They’re probably just sitting around, playing poker and thinking, “Geez, I wish they’d let us develop some kind of hybridized new seeds that the company could patent and then force farmers to buy by threatening to sue them if some of those seeds blow onto their farms and start growing even if the farmers didn’t want the seeds in the first place.”
If you need real, science based information on healthy eating, check out [...] and leave this book and its cult in the compound.
I’ll try to read [...], but when I searched for […] on Amazon, all that came up was a kids’ book titled “Dot and Dash play Dot-Dot-Dot.”
I was hoping the grain lobby wouldn’t find out about our cult. For those of you who haven’t been recruited yet, we have a secret handshake that requires a lot of flexibility in the fingers — that keeps out the grain-lobby infiltrators who are suffering from wheat-induced arthritis. At our meetings, Dr. Davis sacrifices a goat and then we all spend hours enjoying ritual dancing around a bonfire on our pain-free legs. Sometimes we even dance naked. It’s not a sexual thing, you understand … we just like showing off our rash-free skins.
I’m sure this campaign by the grain industry will succeed. Any day now, Dr. Davis will have a conversation with a patient something like this:
“So how do feel after being wheat-free for the past two months?”
“Well, Dr. Davis, I lost 25 pounds, my psoriasis cleared up, my arthritis went away, I’m sleeping better, I’m not depressed anymore, I think more clearly, and I stopped wheezing.”
“Excellent! So you’ll continue avoiding wheat?”
“Of course not.”
“But—“
“Wheat has sustaining humans for 8,000 years, Dr. Davis, so it has to be good for us. Besides, I don’t want to end up spending all day the airport banging on a tambourine and selling flowers to passengers.”
“But I never asked you to– why are you sticking your fingers in your ears?”
“What?”
“I said, WHY ARE YOU STICKING YOUR FINGERS IN YOUR EARS?”
“My de-programmers told me not to listen to you.”

Fat Head interviews Dr. William R. Davis

Interview with ‘Wheat Belly’ Author Dr. William Davis

Posted by Tom Naughton in Good Science, News and Reviews

You all (or y’all, as we say around these parts) submitted so many good questions for Wheat Belly author Dr. William Davis, we decided to make this a two-part Q & A. We’ll probably have part two ready early next week.

Fat Head: You’re a cardiologist by profession, and yet you just wrote an in-depth book about the negative health effects of consuming wheat. How did wheat end up on your radar? What first made you suspect wheat might be behind many of our modern health problems?



Dr. Davis: It started several years ago when I asked patients in my office to consider eliminating all wheat from their diet. I did this because of some very simple logic: If foods made from wheat raise blood sugar higher than nearly all other foods (due to its high-glycemic index), including table sugar, then removing wheat should reduce blood sugar. I was concerned about high blood sugar since around 80% of the people coming to my office had diabetes, pre-diabetes, or what I call “pre-pre-diabetes.” In short, the vast majority of people showed abnormal metabolic markers.
I provided patients with a simple two-page handout on how to do this, i.e., how to eliminate wheat and replace the lost calories with healthy foods like more vegetables, raw nuts, meats, eggs, avocados, olives, olive oil, etc. They’d come back three months later with lower fasting blood sugars, lower hemoglobin A1c (a reflection of the previous 60 days’ blood sugar); some diabetics became non-diabetics, pre-diabetics became non-pre-diabetic. They’d also be around 30 pounds lighter.
Then they began to tell me about other experiences: relief from arthritis and joint pains, chronic rashes disappearing, asthma improved sufficiently to stop inhalers, chronic sinus infections gone, leg swelling gone, migraine headaches gone for the first time in decades, acid reflux and irritable bowel symptoms relieved. At first, I told patients it was just an odd coincidence. But it happened so many times to so many people that it became clear that this was no coincidence; this was a real and reproducible phenomenon.
That’s when I began to systematically remove wheat from everyone’s diet and continued to witness similar turnarounds in health across dozens of conditions. There has been no turning back since.

Fat Head: You cite quite a bit of academic research in your book, but you also cite case histories from your medical practice. So, as a chicken-or-the-egg issue, which came first? Did you start noticing that patients who consumed a lot of wheat had more health problems and then go looking for the research to back up your suspicions, or did you come across research that prompted you to take notice of what your patients were eating?

Dr. Davis: The real-world experience came first. But what surprised me was that there already was an extensive medical literature documenting all of this, but it was largely ignored or didn’t reach mainstream consciousness nor the consciousness of most of my colleagues. And a lot of the documentation comes from the agricultural genetics literature, an area, I can assure you, my colleagues do not study. But I dug into this area of science and talked to people at the USDA and in agriculture departments in universities to gain a full understanding of all the issues.
One of the difficulties that partly explains why much of this information has not previously seen the light of day is that agricultural geneticists work on plants, not humans. There is a broad and pervasive assumption followed by these well-meaning scientists: No matter how extreme the techniques used to alter the genetics of a plant like wheat, it is still just fine for human consumption …no questions asked. I believe that is flat wrong and underlies much of the suffering inflicted on humans consuming this modern product of genetics research still called, misleadingly, “wheat.”

Fat Head: So after pinpointing wheat as a driver of various health problems, you started counseling your patients to eliminate wheat from their diets. What inspired you take the extra step – and it’s a big step – of writing a book?

Dr. Davis: What I witnessed in the thousands of people removing wheat from their diet was nothing short of incredible. When I saw weight loss of 70 pounds in six months, energy and mood surging, reversal of inflammatory diseases such as ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis, relief from chronic rashes and arthritis — and the effects were consistent over and over again — I realized that I could not just let this issue pass quietly in my office practice.
Admittedly, the world is going to need more confirmatory data before wheat, or at least the modern genetically-altered version of wheat we are being sold, is removed from the world’s dinner plate. But the data that are already available are more than enough, I believe, to bring this information to the public for people to make the decision themselves. I liken this situation to living in a village where everyone drinks water from the same well. Nine out of 10 people get sick when they drink water from the well; all recover when they stop drinking from it. Drink from the same well, they all get sick again; stop, they get better. With such a consistent and reproducible cause-and-effect relationship, do we need a clinical trial to prove it to us? I don’t.
This is going to be a long, hard battle in the public arena. Wheat comprises 20% of all human calories. It requires a huge infrastructure to grow, harvest, collect seeds, fertilize, herbicide, process, and distribute. This message is going to potentially hurt the livelihoods of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who are part of the infrastructure. It reminds me of the battles that were fought (and still being fought today) when it became widely accepted that smoking cigarettes was bad. When people within the tobacco industry were asked how they could work for a company that destroyed people’s health, they replied, “I had to support my family and pay my mortgage.” The eliminate-all-wheat-in-the-human-diet argument that I make will hurt many people where it counts: right in the pocketbook. But, personally, I am not willing to sacrifice my own health, the health of my family, friends, neighbors, patients, and the nation to allow the incredibly unhealthy status quo to continue.
Fat Head: The more of the book I read, the more I found myself thinking, “Wow, I knew wheat was bad for us, but it’s even worse than I thought.” Did you have the same reaction while researching the book? Were you surprised at how many physical and mental problems wheat can cause?

Dr. Davis: Yes. I knew wheat was bad from the start of this project. And there were times when I wondered if I was missing something, given the unanimous embracing of this grain by agribusiness, farmers, agricultural scientists, the USDA, FDA, American Dietetic Association, etc. But the opposite happened: The deeper I got into it, this thing being sold to us called “wheat” appeared worse … and worse, and worse, the farther I got.
I am mindful of the “For a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” trap we can all fall into, but when you see disease condition after disease condition vanish with elimination of wheat, you can’t help but become convinced that it plays a crucial role in hundreds, literally hundreds, of common conditions.

Fat Head: You described in your book how today’s wheat is the product of energetic cross-breeding. Is cross-breeding inherently bad? Doesn’t cross-breeding take place in nature all the time?

Dr. Davis: Yes, it does. Humans, along with all plants and animals, are the product of cross-breeding or hybridization. Love, sex, and cross-breeding make the world go ‘round and make life interesting. The problem is that these terms are used very loosely by geneticists.
For example, if I subject wheat seeds and embryos to the potent industrial poison sodium azide, I can induce mutations in the plant’s genetic code. First, let me tell you about sodium azide. If ingested, the poison control people at the Centers for Disease Control advise you to not resuscitate the person who ingested it and stopped breathing as a result —just let the victim die—because the rescuer can die, too. And, if the victim vomits, don’t throw the vomit in the sink because it can explode (this has actually happened). So, expose wheat seeds and embryos to sodium azide and you obtain mutations. This is called chemical mutagenesis. Seeds and embryos can also be exposed to gamma irradiation and high-dose x-ray radiation. All of these techniques fall under the umbrella of hybridization or, even more misleading, traditional breeding techniques. I don’t know about you, but cross-breeding among the humans I know doesn’t involve slipping each other chemical poisons or a romantic evening in the cyclotron to induce mutations in our offspring.
These “traditional breeding techniques,” by the way, are markedly more disruptive to the plant’s genetics than genetic engineering. Americans are up in arms about genetically-modified (GMO) foods (i.e., the insertion or deletion of a single gene). The great irony is that genetic engineering is a substantial improvement over “traditional breeding techniques” that have gone on for decades and are still going on.
[Note from Tom: I tried talking my wife into stepping into a cyclotron with me on our honeymoon. She told me to stop drinking the champagne and go to sleep.]

Fat Head: I met you in person over a year ago, and you’re a very lean guy, so I was surprised to learn from the book that you used to carry around your very own wheat belly. Describe the differences between you as a wheat-eater and you now, both in terms of your physique and your health.

Dr. Davis: Thirty pounds ago, while I was still an enthusiastic consumer of “healthy whole grains,” I struggled with constant difficulties in maintaining focus and energy. I relied on pots of coffee or walking and exercise just to battle the constant stuporous haze. My cholesterol values reflected my wheat-consuming habits: HDL 27 mg/dl (very low), triglycerides 350 mg/dl (VERY high), and blood sugars in the diabetic range (161 mg/dl). I had high blood pressure, running values around 150/90. And all my excess weight was around my middle—yes, my very own wheat belly.
Saying goodbye to wheat has helped me shed the weight around the middle; my cholesterol values: HDL 63 mg/dl, triglycerides 50 mg/dl, LDL 70 mg/dl, blood sugar 84 mg/dl, BP 114/74—using no drugs. In other words, everything reversed. Everything reversed including the struggle to maintain attention and focus. I can now concentrate and focus on something for so long that my wife yells for me to stop.
All in all, I feel better today at age 54 than I felt at age 30.

Fat Head: How has learning what you now know about wheat and other grains changed your medical practice?

Dr. Davis: It has catapulted success in helping people regain health into the stratosphere. Among people following this diet, i.e., eliminate wheat and limit other carbohydrates (along with the other heart-healthy strategies I advocate, including omega-3 fatty acid supplementation with fish oil, vitamin D supplementation to achieve a desirable 25-hydroxy vitamin D level of 60-70 ng/ml, iodine supplementation and normalization of thyroid dysfunction), I no longer see heart attacks. The only heart attacks I see are people whom I’ve just met or those who, for one reason or another (usually lack of interest) don’t follow the diet. A priest I take care of, for instance, a wonderful and generous man, couldn’t bring himself to turn down the muffins, pies, and breads his parishioners brought him every day; he had a heart attack despite doing everything else right.
This diet approach, though it seems quirky on the surface, is extremely powerful. What diet, after all, causes substantial weight loss, corrects the causes of heart disease such as small LDL particles, reverses diabetes and pre-diabetes, and improves or cures multiple conditions ranging from rheumatoid arthritis to acid reflux?

Fat Head: You’ve seen hundreds of your own patients become cured of supposedly incurable diseases after giving up wheat. Describe one or two of the most dramatic examples.

Dr. Davis: Two people are on my mind nearly every day, mostly because I am especially gratified about the magnitude of their response and because I shudder to think what their lives would have been like had they not engaged in this diet change.
I describe Wendy’s story in the book, a 36-year mother and schoolteacher who had nearly incapacitating ulcerative colitis; so bad that, despite three medications, she continued to suffer constant cramps, diarrhea, and bleeding sufficient to require blood transfusions. When I met Wendy, she told me that her gastroenterologist and surgeon had scheduled her for colon removal and creation of an ileostomy bag. These would be lifelong changes; she would be consigned to wearing a bag to catch stool at the surface for the rest of her life. I urged her to remove wheat. At first, she objected, since her intestinal biopsies and blood work all failed to suggest celiac disease. But, having seen many amazing things happen with removal of wheat, I suggested that there was nothing to lose. She did it. Three months later, not only had she lost 38 pounds, but all the cramps, diarrhea, and bleeding had stopped. It’s now been two years. She’s off all drugs with no sign of the disease left—colon intact, no ileostomy bag. She is cured.
The second case is Jason, also described in the book, a 26-year old software programmer, in this case incapacitated by joint pains and arthritis. Consultations with three rheumatologists failed to yield a diagnosis; all prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs and pain medication, while Jason continued to hobble around, unable to engage in much more than short walks. Within five days of removing all wheat, Jason was 100% free of joint pains. He told that he found this absolutely ridiculous and refused to believe it. So he had a sandwich: Joint pains rushed right back. He’s now strictly wheat-free and pain-free.

Fat Head: Your patients are lucky – you’d rather change a patient’s diet than write a prescription whenever possible. Unfortunately, you’re in the minority. As I recounted on my blog recently, a co-worker’s wife was finally cured of her pounding headaches when an acquaintance suggested she stop eating grains. She’d been to several doctors who merely prescribed medications. So … why are so few doctors aware of how grains can affect our health?

Dr. Davis: I believe healthcare has detoured towards high-tech, high revenue-producing procedures, medications, and catastrophic care. Too many in healthcare have lost the vision of helping people and fulfilling their mission to heal. While that sounds old-fashioned, I believe it is a bad trend for healthcare to be reduced to a financial transaction bound by legal constraints. It needs to be restored to a relationship of healing.
I believe that many in healthcare have also been disenchanted with the ineffectiveness of dietary advice. Because dietary “wisdom” has been wrong on so many counts over the past 50 years, people have become soured on the ability of nutrition and natural methods to improve health. From what I’ve witnessed, however, nutrition and natural methods have enormous power to heal—if the right methods are applied.

Fat Head: Do you hope your book will educate more doctors on the topic, or is this one of those situations where the public will have to ignore their doctors and educate themselves?

Dr. Davis: Regrettably, many people will read the message in Wheat Belly, experience the life-changing health and weight transformations that can result, then they will then tell their doctors, who will declare their success “coincidence,” “mind over matter,” “placebo effect,” or some other dismissal. Many of my colleagues refuse to recognize the power of diet even when confronted with powerful results. That can only change over a very long time.
Thankfully, more and more of my colleagues are beginning to see the light and not look for the answer in drugs and procedures. These are the healthcare providers that I hope will emerge to assist people as advocates and coaches in conducting an experience like that described in Wheat Belly.

Fat Head: If more doctors were informed of the issues you wrote about in Wheat Belly, do you think they’d change their dietary advice, or is the “fat is bad, grains are good” mentality too ingrained in the profession?

Dr. Davis: There is absolutely no question that the “fat is bad, grains are good” argument will persist in the minds of many of my colleagues for many years. However, I believe if they were to read the arguments laid out logically in Wheat Belly, they would first come to recognize that “wheat” is no longer wheat but an incredibly transformed product of genetics research. Then they would begin to follow the logic and understand that the long menu of problems associated with consumption of modern “wheat” begins to explain why we’ve all been witnessing an explosion in common diseases. That’s when I hope we all hear a collective “Aha!”