Active Low-Carber Forums - Nonsense claims versus keto...

Quote:

Mortality rate
He added: "There's only one slight problem: and that's cardiovascular events. If you look at mortality - I remember pulling out the slide from 2007, that's the first one I saw, large randomized trial, looking at the ketogenic diet and showing that it increased mortality by about 22 percent.

"So I was talking about that and making sure everyone was hearing about that, and then there was one the Journal of the American Heart Association published a few years later that isolated the people who had had a heart attack in the past, the cardiology population that we're seeing, and they were doing a ketogenic diet. It was a 53 percent increase in mortality. No one should be doing this.

"Don't limit yourself to these two trials - take every trial that's ever been published across the world, do a meta-analysis, I think they had 13 or 16 trials in it, and average them all out...and the answer was 31 percent increase in mortality. So it's not something people should do unless your weight loss is more important than your life."

https://www.plantbasednews.org/post...ng-cardiologist

The speaker is Kim Allan Williams. Technically "Dr." but I don't care about that much on reading this. :lol:

Saw the article on facebook, I quoted the above and responded;

Problem here is only that there are no such studies. We'd have heard of them, people would be in our face with them all the time, and the studies themselves would be cited, over and over. All I've seen are epidemiological studies that look at dietary "scores" and mortality, not interventions. For interventions to show mortality, they'd have to be very long--or involve sickly cohorts, or very old, liable to fall over dead at any time. Don't let the word "randomized" fool you into thinking that it means that people were randomized onto this or that diet--in this case, it likely means a different sort of randomization, ensuring that the cohorts that were compared weren't skewed, with more women, or gypsies, or alcoholics or what not in the fake-Atkins versus the other groups.

Remember how very recently we were being told that there were no long-term intervention type studies to show effects on cardiovascular disease or mortality? This is still true. Dokter Williams even alludes to it here;

Quote:

Dr. Williams said: "I like the basic concept that you change your dietary habits and you change something. You can make a change, you can discipline yourself.

"Unfortunately, the science of it is wrong. If all you wanted was short-term weight loss - and short-term could be a year or two - if that's all you're looking for, great."

Short-term could be a year or two--because that's the most we have, being generous, on the effects of an actual intervention, if we demand controlled interventions. Williams is wanting it both ways--looking at benefits of a low carb or ketogenic diet, looking only at controlled, randomized interventions, and saying this data is too short-term. Looking at supposed "dangers"--suddenly, epidemiology will do.

Supposedly clinical/anecdotal evidence is useless. I'd probably rather go to a doctor with reams of useless clinical evidence in his files showing that somehow, coincidentally, his patients did better on his low-carb diet. Versus one updated on Walter Willett's latest nonsense.