Hugging and Chalking

This blog is about obesity and the inanity/insanity it spawns, the encroaching lawsuits and growing diet industry. Obesity is a matter of genes and personal responsibility. You can have an endocrine problem, or you can have a balance problem (too many calories and too little exercise). It’s not where you eat, but how much you eat; it’s not McDonald’s fault, or Mama’s fault, or Washington’s fault if your body is too fat or too thin. Rosabelle.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Low fat--low results

And not much taste, either.

"The Women's Health Initiative (WHI), of which the Dietary Modification Trial is one component, is one of the most outstanding achievements in clinical research history. The National Institutes of Health established the WHI in 1991 to address the most common causes of death, disability, and impaired quality of life in postmenopausal women. This multimillion-dollar, 15-year project, involving 161 808 women aged 50 through 79 years, was designed to address many of the inequities in women's health research and provide practical information to women and their physicians about hormone therapy, calcium/vitamin D supplements, dietary patterns, and prevention of heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis.

The Dietary Modification Trial component evaluated the effect of a low-fat (target 20% fat), high–fruit/vegetable and grain diet on the prevention of breast and colorectal cancer and heart disease. Between 1993 and 1998, 48 835 postmenopausal women with a mean baseline age of 62.3 years, mean body mass index of 29.1, and a dietary fat intake of at least 32% of total calories (approximately the 50th percentile for fat intake) were randomly assigned to either the self-selected dietary control group or the low-fat dietary intervention, which aimed to change dietary patterns but did not encourage weight loss or caloric reduction (even though the vast majority of participants were obese or overweight).

The trial did provide a unique opportunity to examine long-term effects of an ad libitum low-fat dietary pattern on body weight and the relationships between weight changes and specific changes in dietary components. The authors reported a 2.2-kg weight loss in the intervention group at year 1 (1.9 kg between groups) and a modest 0.4-kg difference between the groups at the 7.5-year mark (P = .01). They concluded that a low-fat eating pattern does not result in weight gain in postmenopausal women."

Editorial in JAMA 2006;295:94-95 You can register free for this site and read the articles if they are 6 mo. old.


Eat less; move more; eat all the colors. It works, but doesn't sell books.

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