“Fraudulent Science”

Yep, and who does fraudulent science? Fraudulent researchers ( grant whores ). And what are fraudulent researchers? They're frauds.

Well, as I try to finish up a post on saturated fat and one particular fraud from abroad, I just came across an interview by the great Uffe Ravnskov, whom I've mentioned in blogs a few times, at least. Here's an excerpt dealing with the current state of the diet-sanity revolution in Sweden.

Do you think mainstream medicine will ever relinquish its view that elevated cholesterol causes heart disease and that statins are the magic bullet?

I hope so. The failures of the most recent statin trials has been commented by several journalists in the major US newspapers. In Sweden a revolution is going on. Here, a general practitioner treated her own obesity successfully by eating a low-carbohydrate diet with a high content of animal fat. When she advised her obese and diabetic patients to do the same, she was reported to the National Board of Health and Welfare for malpractice. After a two-year-long investigation she was acquitted, as her treatment was considered to be in accord with scientific evidence. At the same time, the Board dismissed two experts, who had been appointed for updating the dietary recommendations for diabetics, because it came up that they were sponsored by the food industry. Instead the Board has asked independent researchers to review the scientific literature.

The subject has gained general attention due to a number of radio and television shows, where critical experts including myself have discussed the issue with representatives of the official view. Most important, thousands of patients have experienced themselves that by doing the opposite as recommended by the current guidelines they have regained their health. The effect has been that the sales of butter, cream and fat milk are increasing in Sweden after many years of decline, and a recent poll showed that a majority of Swedish people today think that the best way of losing weight is by a low-carbohydrate, fat-rich diet.

Further progress was achieved this spring. Several times colleagues of mine and also myself have asked the Swedish Food Administration for the scientific basis of their warnings against saturated fat. We have been met with the argument that there are thousands of such studies, or by referrals to the WHO guidelines or the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations. As the main argument in the latter two is that saturated fat raises cholesterol we were not satisfied with their answer and finally the Food Administration published a list with 72 studies that they claimed were in support of their view on saturated fat and twelve that were not.

We scrutinized the lists and found that only two of the 72 studies supported their standpoint; eleven studies did not concern saturated fat at all, and the unsupportive list was incomplete, to put it mildly. We published a short report with our comments to these lists in the Swedish medical journal Dagens Medicin. A response from the Food Administration appeared seven weeks later in which they pointed out that their recommendations were directed to healthy people, not to patients. They maintained that they were based on solid scientific evidence without mentioning anything about saturated fat and without answering our critical comments.

But this is not all. Earlier this year Sachdeva et al reported that the mean cholesterol in 137,000 patients with acute myocardial infarction was lower than normal. As usual, the authors didn’t understand their own findings, but concluded that cholesterol should be lowered even more. A few months later Al-Mallah et al. came up with the same result and conclusion, although they also reported that three years later, mortality was twice as high among those who had been admitted with the lowest cholesterol.

These results created a fierce debate in one of the major Swedish newspapers. It was opened by ninety-one-year old Lars Werkö, the ‘Grand Old Man’ in Swedish medical science, retired professor in internal medicine and former head of The Swedish Council on Technology Assessment in Health Care, together with Tore Scherstén, retired professor in surgery and former secretary of the Swedish Medical Research Council. “Now it is time to sack the cholesterol hypothesis and to investigate the reason of this scientific breakdown” they wrote. They also criticized American researchers in AHA and NHLBI and their followers for sloppy and fraudulent science.

They were of course attacked by two professors and representatives of the current view, but none of them came up with any substantial evidence, only by personalities.

[emphasis added]

"Only by personalities." Yep, you'll get that a lot:  argumentum ad verecundium. In this context, it means they have nothing but the say-so of the sorts of frauds I identified right at the beginning.

Alright, here you go with the whole interview that Peter at Hyperlipid put up on his archive site.

Oh, hey, want to read some silly bits and more  argumentum ad verecundium from another fraud? How about T. Colin Campbell, author of the ridiculous The China Study. No, haven't read it. Don't need to. Chris Masterjohn:

What is most shocking about the China Study is not what it found, but the contrast between Campbell’s representation of its findings in The China Study, and the data contained within the original monograph. Campbell summarizes the 8,000 statistically significant correlations found in the China Study in the following statement: "people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease."26 He also claims that, although it is "somewhat difficult" to "show that animal-based food intake relates to overall cancer rates," that nevertheless, "animal protein intake was convincingly associated in the China Study with the prevalence of cancer in families."27

But the actual data from the original publication paints a different picture. Figure 1 shows selected correlations between macronutrients and cancer mortality. Most of them are not statistically significant, which means that the probability the correlation is due to chance is greater than five percent. It is interesting to see, however, the general picture that emerges. Sugar, soluble carbohydrates, and fiber all have correlations with cancer mortality about seven times the magnitude of that of animal protein, and total fat and fat as a percentage of calories were both negatively correlated with cancer mortality. The only statistically significant association between intake of a macronutrient and cancer mortality was a large protective effect of total oil and fat intake as measured on the questionnaire. As an interesting aside, there was a highly significant negative correlation between cancer mortality and home-made cigarettes!

At any rate, guess who popped up over at the Amazon Low-Carb discussion forum? He hasn't posted any of his stupid drivel in a couple of days, so maybe his tail is tucked. It's interesting he showed up there, though. Perhaps the tide really is turning and some of these assholes see the writing on the wall and are trying to figure their next angle (or, how best to lie their way past having their credibility smashed, as justice demands).

Too many frauds, too little time.

Related posts:

1. Ouch! More Low LDL Cholesterol to “Die For”
2. Bad Science and Confirmation Bias
3. More Links & Quick Hits
4. Good Calories, Bad Calories
5. Saturated Fat is Good For You!