Media Literacy
Low Carb Kills?
A widely publicized study claims low-carb diets increase early death risk. Yet examining the methodology reveals serious, systematic flaws.
Media Literacy
A widely publicized study claims low-carb diets increase early death risk. Yet examining the methodology reveals serious, systematic flaws.
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Media literacy is essential today — in this age of information overload. Too often, people struggle to sift through information to identify the most meaningful content. The Americans have a term for this: infobesity.
The word combines information and obesity (fatness) — just as with food, there is junk information that seems superfluous and makes us (psychologically) sick.
Back to us: the longer you engage with studies, the more obvious the gap between high-quality and poor studies becomes. Not every study is good just because it undergoes peer review and gets published in some scientific journal. For our readers, we pre-select studies, meaning we primarily reference research from the world's best journals — but only after we've read them ourselves and deemed them worthwhile.
Recently, another utterly pointless study made its way into the English-language media. [Source no longer available]: "Low carb diets INCREASE your risk of an early death" — low-carb eating patterns increase the risk of premature death. One's immediate thought: if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
Anyone who has eaten lower-carb themselves will know that many, many aspects of diet improve and numerous aspects of one's energy metabolism get better — for example, blood lipids, body fat — not worse. You eat more protein, often more fruit and vegetables, you eat far more micronutrient-dense foods, and so on.
Unfortunately, many still picture a low-carb diet as consisting solely of bacon, eggs, and cheese. For this reason, we at edubily stopped using the term low carb years ago to describe our typical dietary recommendations — even though compared to standard diets, you'd certainly eat fewer carbohydrates here.
Apparently, there are still scientists who imagine a low-carb diet exactly this way — and are determined to prove how bad it is. You can do this by simply choosing criteria you yourself associate with unhealthy eating. Because, as in real life, in science too: the more often you repeat something, the truer it becomes.
Chinese and U.S. researchers report ([source no longer available]) that an "unhealthy low-carb diet," as well as low-carb diets in general, have a less favorable effect on mortality in older adults compared to low-fat diets — whereas, according to their findings, low-fat diets protect against cancer and heart attacks and lower overall mortality.
Anyone reading the methods section of this paper shakes their head:
The researchers throw all of this into a pot, stir it a bit, and voilà — the brew is done.
It's striking: in this long chain of reasoning and data collection, there are countless imprecisions and inaccuracies such that you might as well have rolled the dice for the results.
At the end of the day, the authors themselves write that an important limitation of their work is the fact that they asked participants about their diet only once over the 24-year span. It's possible that eating habits might change over 24 years — who would have thought.
About ten years ago, when I (Chris) was a sports student, I brought lamb fillet in my lunchbox instead of bread, and people gave me strange looks. "Low carb" was like an alien diet back then. But in 1995/96, half of the surveyed people — mind you, aged between 50 and 70 — could supposedly be classified as low-carb? That's laughable.
Another study for the virtual trash heap. Unfortunately, many journalists eagerly jump on such studies because they generate headlines. Unfortunately, headlines have a very long half-life on the internet and persistently shape society's opinions. For exactly this reason, many people still prefer bread and such. ;-)
