STRONG OFFENSE

Promoting The Health Benefits

By Ronnie P. Cons

Red meat is often wrongly portrayed as being unhealthy. some in the media as unhealthy or not environmentally friendly.

Vegan, fish and other non-meat diets have been proposed as healthier alternatives. The result of this onslaught of negative meat messages has influenced many families to cut back on their meat and poultry purchases. Perceptions may reality but truth trumps misinformation. Parents and other consumers want what is best for their health and that of their families. They are also aware that a lot of false information is out there and as such, are open to scientific facts that can correct their misconceptions.

The bottom line here is that the AHA paper did not look systematically at evidence on heart-disease outcomes for any diet. Whether its stated aim, to evaluate diets against the AHA’s own “gold standard,” stands up to scrutiny depends on whether the AHA nutritional plan itself has been demonstrated to protect against heart disease. That’s a topic for another post, but spoiler alert: in the AHA’s most recent systematic review, in 2019, only a single clinical trial is cited to support the group’s nutrition recommendations. Can you guess which study that is? (Further, a single trial does not actually rise to the AHA’s own evidentiary standards, which call for multiple randomized clinical trials to substantiate guidelines. But a lack of evidence for guidelines is unfortunately not a rare occurrence for the AHA: a 2019 analysis published in JAMA found that only 8.5% of AHA/ACC guidelines met their evidence standards.)

This provides an opportunity for retail meat departments to implement an instore ‘Healthy Meat Facts’ nutritional campaign to set the record straight and convince their liver, 625 spinach. Iron found found in absorption.

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For a woman to receive her recommended daily intake of 18 mg of iron, she would need just 300 grams of cooked bovine

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In the case of the dozens of news items on a presentation given at the American College of Cardiology conference in March, these reported that a “keto” or “keto-like” diet is associated with higher LDL-cholesterol and greater risk of cardiovascular events. None of these findings could be confirmed, however, because the lead researcher for this study, Iulia Iatan, a physician-researcher for the University of British Columbia and Healthy Heart Program Prevention Clinic at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, only spoke about her research at the conference. Nothing is in print, not even an abstract or pre-print of the study, which are typical ways that researchers present preliminary work.

Still, the ACC issued a press release on Iatan’s utterings. Among the ACC’s 40-plus press releases issued during the conference, I found that only two were based on unpublished, unregistered work, Iatan’s included.

I asked the ACC if the group had any evidentiary standards for issuing a press releases, i.e., why merely spoken words at a conference would justify such media amplification, and a representative explained that sometimes “clinical research data” were selected for press releases-although Iatan’s study was not clinical research (it was an observational study, a much weaker form of evidence).

Contacting Iatan proved fruitless. She did not respond to emails or phone calls. Amidst my attempts to reach her, her employer’s press rep, Ann Gibbon, popped into my email box to say that Iatan was not available.

We had a further back-and-forth about a somewhat Orwellian aspect of Iatan’s study. Despite the dozens of headlines stemming from Iatan’s presentation on a “keto” and “keto-like” diet, I discovered that Iatan had not, in fact, looked at a keto diet, which is typically defined as having 20 grams of carbs or less; Iatan’s study used a definition of five times that, or 100 grams. She herself described her study diet, accurately, as “low-carb, highfat” in the ACC press release but then called it “ketolike” in another report.

Definitional accuracy is a fundamental starting point for good science, yet no one involved in the ACC “news” event seemed to have minded about the serious mislabeling problem. Indeed, Iatan, the University of British Columbia, and the ACC all posted headlines about a “keto” diet.

Still, when I queried Iatan’s press rep Ms. Gibbon about the inaccurate use of “keto,” she said she would demand a correction if I used that word to describe Iatan’s study, even though a “keto” post was at that moment on Iatan’s own university website, and apparently Ms. Gibbon wasn’t pursuing corrections on this issue with the ACC, CNN. com, GoodMorningAmerica.com, Salon, Fortune, Fox.com, Medscape, WebMD, Medical News Today, or any of the other 20+ outlets that had reported on the study as “keto” or “keto-like.”

CAMPAIGN AGAINST KETO?

When people say that nutrition science is difficult to understand, they’re 100% correct. Often, there are genuine disputes over complex science. However, I think the phenomenon we may be seeing here is something different: an apparently purposeful amplification of non-existent “findings” on “keto.” I don’t know whether this represents a concerted effort to denigrate the diet. Certainly, one can imagine many potential motives.

For instance, keto, as the virtual opposite of the official recommendations of these groups (AHA and ACC, as well as the US. Dietary Guidelines for Americans), must trigger intellectual and cognitive dissonance for experts who have ‘known’ differently for their entire careers. Also, it feels cynical to say but is nonetheless undeniably true that because keto allows people to get off many or all of their medications, the diet poses a clear threat to pharmaceutical companies. Chronic diseases that require lifelong medications are a sweet spot of assured revenue for this industry. After all, pharmaceutical companies spent more than $8 billion on media advertising last year (up from $6 billion in 2020), and their aim is not for you to consume fewer of their products. This fact may also go some ways towards explaining why many media outlets are so quick to publish non-existent keto findings.

The ACC reported receiving 38% of its revenue from industry in 2012, and the AHA reported 20% of revenue from industry in 2014.

(If anyone knows more recent numbers, I’d love to see).

It’s one thing not to trust the media. Half of all Americans now believe news organizations deliberately mislead them--an historic low. However, distrusting groups like the AHA and ACC comes harder.

On the bright side, when your doctor or friend who’s read the spate of headlines this year tells you to steer clear of that “dangerous” keto diet, you can tell them that’s fake news. And when the next round of bad keto news comes, you’ll know to read between the headlines and check the facts.

For more information, visit : https://unsettledscience.substack.com/