Bad What?: Science? -- Reporting? -- Blogging/Sharing?

Confession time.  I found out about that recent LC v. LF diet study from Andreas Eenfeldt's blog.  Andreas seems woefully misguided into thinking that obese Americans got that way listening to US Government guidelines and eating a low fat diet.  Any and every study that shows some advantage for LC is rapidly added to his list demonstrating that LCHF is superior and LF diets are nothing short of criminal at this point.  I'll have some personal things to say about all of this at the end of the post.  Gossip Mongers can skip to there if you like ;-) (scroll down to line, or browser search on "And so now")

In any case, in a blog post entitled New Study: High Fat Food is Good for Diabetics, Andreas cites this "news" article:  High-fat diet lowered blood sugar and improved blood lipids in diabetics.  Another low carb advocate, Dr. Eades, also tweeted the following:  RCT shows better glycemic control & improved lipid labs seen in diabetics on #lowcarb as compared to lowfat diets.  The tweet links to this report:  Questioning Carbohydrate Restriction in Diabetes Management.

Now this was an RCT = Randomized Controlled Trial.  The type of study generally considered to be the gold standard of trials, but we've discussed here before how not all RCT's are created equal, and as serendipity would have it, Andreas was one I called out in:  A Matter of Control.  In his short blog post, Andreas calls the current study at hand "a new high-quality Swedish study".  Does the study itself deserve that label?  After looking at it more closely the past few days, no.  If for no other reason, because the study participants didn't report eating the diets as prescribed.  The intended control is also limited to caloric intake.  I contend that when one is comparing diets of different macronutrient composition, one of the three must be controlled for -- e.g. held constant -- varying the other two, or the results will forever be tainted.  

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