more low-carb ignorance
21 Nov 2003The top story on Yahoo! news is a “Big Story” about Atkins and heart risks. Yesterday, a story warns:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A nutrition advocacy group warned on Thursday that the popular Atkins diet may cause heart disease and could have killed a teen-age dieter
Wow. That’s pretty a pretty powerful discovery – it must have taken years of research! Their methodology?
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine stressed it could not prove the diet had hurt or killed anyone. But one dieter said he believed the approach clogged his arteries and the parents of a teen-ager who died while on the diet also blamed her meat-heavy regimen.
Uh huh.
Another story today cites another claim of serious problems with the Atkins diet:
Gorran says the diet gave him heart disease, and he believes he can prove it. A heart scan conducted six months before he started the diet showed no evidence of the plaque or calcification routinely seen in people with heart problems. But after two years on the Atkins diet he had developed angina and had a 99% blockage in a major artery.
Has this guy never heard of post hoc ergo propter hoc? He believes he can prove it?! Gee, if only there were a rigid, defined process for determining these sorts of things that relies on control groups and empirical data. Some sort of .. “method” .. that we could use for “science”. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to rely on this one guy that got heart disease. False alarm, folks – back to your low-fat feeding troughs. Nothing to see here.