Tag: seven countries study

• TIME Magazine Article – Eat Butter

  It is with alarm that I read Bryan Walsh’s article Ending the War on Fat that was published in TIME magazine on 23 June 2014.

  According to Walsh:

  Keys' work became the foundation for a body of science implicating fat as a major risk factor for heart disease. The Seven Countries Study has been referenced close to 1 million times.  But Keys' research had problems from the start.  He cherry-picked his data.

  If the book has really been "referenced close to a million times", it means that it has been referenced close to 80 times every day, including weekends, since the book was published in 1980.

  Walsh claims that Keys “cherry-picked” his data.  It is evident that Walsh has confused with Keys’ 1953 paper Keys’ paper, Atherosclerosis, A Problem in Newer Public Health and his later study Seven Countries, A Multivariate Analysis of Death and Coronary Heart Disease.

  Walsh fails to elaborate on how Keys “cherry picked” his data. Commencing in 1957, the Seven Countries Study studied 12,763 men in 16 regions in seven countries. What data was omitted from this study? How was the data “cherry-picked”?

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  11 July 2014

• Why are there so many points of view regarding nutrition?

  There can be a tendency for researchers and commentators to become attached to one particular area and not be able to see the relationship and interconnectedness with the different aspects of the same disease.

  Also, much research is focused on individual components of nutrition, such as individual minerals, vitamins, or components such as fats or saturated fats.

  Once again, researchers can become attached to one particular element of nutrition. We search for the magic supplement or the one miraculous cure.

  Nutrition is the result of endless number of components in food. Health is the result of the relationship between all that we eat (and absorb during digestion), our relationships with others, the community that we live in and the world that we inhabit.

  Looking at individual components of food in isolation can never give a complete picture.

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  4 May 2014