He’s baaaaaaaack! Dr. Michael Miller gets his fat-hating study published
Another day, another so-called published “study” slamming the Atkins diet. Some things just never change. And yet some things seem to stay the same, too.
Details about the latest anti-low-carb research to come down the pipeline are documented in this Yahoo news story and my fellow low-carb blogging friend Laura Dolson from About.com’s Low-Carb Diets site writes an excellent recap of the study details. I even blogged about it when the study was first presented publicly in 2007.
Here are the basic details of the study:
Lead researcher Dr. Michael Miller from the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical Center received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to observe cholesterol and heart health risk factors when dieters reached their weight loss goals and decide to stay on their same diet. One would think this kind of an in-depth study would involve at least several hundred overweight participants on a variety of dietary plans to shed the pounds over at least a one-year period of time, right? Nope.
The study included 18 HEALTHY and NORMAL WEIGHT people who each went on one of three diet plans for four weeks at a time:
ATKINS–50% fat
SOUTH BEACH–30% fat
ORNISH–10% fat
The study participants engaged in all three diets with a four-week period between the diets from January to December 2006. Cholesterol levels were checked at the beginning of each new four-week period prior to starting on a new diet and the researcher evaluated other heart health risk factors as well. Additionally, since the study participants were on their own with the foods they ate, a 3-day food record journal was also looked at at the end of each four-week period. Blood vessel function was also checked by measuring the blood vessel dilation in the arm.
Dr. Miller stated that the higher the saturated fat is in the diet, the lower the blood vessel dilation is, which regulates the flow of blood in the body. Wagging his finger of blame at the worst culprit in his opinion, he scorned the diet that contained the most saturated fat.
“The diet that performed the worst was the Atkins diet,” Miller said.
Hmmmmm, that’s an awful familiar quote, Dr. Miller. It’s almost verbatim what you said in this November 2007 Reuters news story when you released the results of this study at an American Heart Association meeting. Let me refresh your memory on what you said at the time.
“It really is the Atkins diet that is the worst,” Miller said to Reuters.
But you didn’t stop there with your anti-Atkins bias, did you, Dr. Miller? Let’s see what else you had to say about the healthy low-carb lifestyle.
“We don’t recommend the Atkins diet,” Miller added in the Reuters story. “Why not start out with a diet that will be healthier for you in the long run after weight loss?”
Ahhhhh, now don’t you just love it when there is objectiveness by researchers doing studies on diet and health? Wow, Dr. Miller, you do such a great job separating your own personal beliefs and opinions about nutrition and the impact it has on people–NOT! And the further evidence of this is in his interpretation of the lipid data.
Because the Atkins diet included 30 grams of that dastardly of all substances known as saturated fat compared with 14 and 3 grams respectively for the South Beach and Ornish diet, Dr. Miller scolded the famous low-carb diet for being much too high as a percentage of total calories–which he says saturated fat needs to be under 7 percent.
“So, if your caloric intake is 2,000, saturated fat should be about 14 grams [or less] daily,” he noted.
Why Dr. Miller? When carbohydrate intake is significantly reduced to below 10 percent of total caloric intake, saturated fat is passive. It’s the dietary carbs that cause all the problems with health, not the fat. A true Atkins diet would have a fat/protein/carbohydrate ratio of around 70/20/10, not 50/20/30. Therein may lie your problem with the results you found.
But he also failed in his interpretation of the lipid panels. Did Dr. Miller look at HDL cholesterol or triglycerides? Not at all. The only thing reported on was that the LDL cholesterol levels went up slightly by 8 percent which was not statistically different at all. This is not uncommon for people who begin a low-carb diet in the short term.
Even still, the LDL is really insignificant unless you are measuring the size and total particles found in that LDL cholesterol. This was not measured in the study participants at all. Incidentally, the South Beach diet decreased the LDL by 12 percent and the Ornish dieters dropped theirs by 17 percent. Again, big whoop-dee-doo! Wanna bet the Atkins diet produced a higher INCREASE in their HDL and DECREASE in their triglycerides than the other diets? We’ll never know.
Plus, we’re talking about only 18 people who don’t even have a weight problem in this study going back and forth between some really radical extremes of the diet spectrum from a high-carb, low-fat diet to a high-fat, low-carb diet. I don’t think going four weeks between them is near enough time for the body to adjust to whatever the next diet is. Calling this a flawed study is an understatement!
Dr. Miller’s study was published in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Unfortunately for Dr. Miller, his bias against the saturated fat-heavy Atkins diet becomes crystal clear when you see what diet he thinks happens to be the healthiest one for people to eat (HINT: Think Dr. Michael Ozner!):
Add Dr. Miller to that group of people who are falling all over themselves to push the Mediterranean diet as the best diet for people to eat. No wonder he is so critical of a high-fat, low-carb plan like Atkins because it doesn’t jive with his personal agenda to promote a high-carb, low-fat diet. Now the truth is getting out!
You can send your feedback about this study directly to Dr. Michael Miller by using his “Ask The Expert” form. Sounds to me like this “expert” has a thing or two to learn about what long-term low-carb living is REALLY all about. Don’t hold back!
Yeah, let’s just have you take this aspirin every day for that inflammation. Nevermind all the excess carbs causing the inflammation.
Ah yes… the high carb Mediterranean Diet… which looks nothing like the real diet from that area…
http://westonaprice.org/traditional_diets/meddiet.html
Ornish has been saying since the ’70’s that his diet will raise trigycerides and lower HDL. He doesn’t think that’s a problem because (he said back then) triglycerides aren’t an independent factor that correlates with heart disease and how much HDL you produce depends on how much bad fats are in your blood: they are the “garbage trucks”that show up when you need them.
I don’t know a.) if he still thinks that, and b.) if it’s true. Taubes says looking at blood markers correlates poorly with who actually gets sick, and I bet he’s right since he’s read everything that’s ever been written, as far as I can tell.
There are so many different opinions about blood markers: fluffy vs. dense (I notice that 2 cardiologists you interviewed were concerned about your cholesterol even though you may be the fluffiest person on the planet), triglyceride/HDL ratio, total cholesterol/HDL. Which really correlates with who dies of heart disease? I can’t figure it out. I wish somebody smart would show which of these measures accurately predicts who gets sick and who doesn’t.
Meantime, I’ll just prefer the markers that I come out well on, and figure the ones I do poorly on aren’t reliable.
Oh, Dr. Ornish STILL thinks of HDL as “garbage trucks” and he said as much in my interviews with him. What we have here are differences philosophically in the role of lipid health on cardiovascular disease risk. One side says just look at the total and LDL cholesterol and keep those numbers in check while the more thinking side explains it is about the HDL/triglyceride ratio and the LDL particle size. The former is based on years of faulty science and indoctrination by the people who are supposed to know better while the latter is founded in solid research and backed up by those of us who are living it.
–Jimmy
My question is: is there a study that compares the different ways of calculating heart disease risk, and shows which one is more accurate?
I’m not aware of any, Peter, but Dr. Dean Ornish would say his diet reverses heart disease itself…not just the risks.
–Jimmy
I found out in reading Taubes why it is that fat + carbs = fat storage. You need some kind of sugar to make glycerol phosphate, which is the central axis of a triglyceride and what the three lipid molecules stick to. Glucose works fairly well, but fructose works even better. Now you know why table sugar and HFCS are so awful. (Well, one reason.)
Atkins already stated that triglycerides seem to mark a halfway point between elevated blood glucose and fat storage. Now we know the mechanism. Triglycerides are how fat cells lock lipids inside themselves. They are also a transport mechanism for lipids going from the liver to the fat cells.
If you’re making triglycerides, that means whatever you’re eating is making you fatter. It also means you’re not burning off all the glucose- or fructose-forming food you eat (i.e., carbs). The weight gain is annoying, but throwing your sugar metabolism out of whack is going to kill you in the long run.
You know, the government’s been hounding alternative medicine practitioners, including Atkins, for years and years–simply for not toeing the line on mainstream medical thinking. Here Ornish is, giving people advice that is undoubtedly killing them. Why in the world does Ornish still have a medical license?