Barry GrovesTag Archives

Your doctor’s advice may not be so great

While reading Trick And Treat by Barry Groves, I found information about an important study of heart disease interventions done in Finland. This study is important because the intervention group in this study was given the current standard of care for the prevention of heart attacks. One group was given the standard heart disease interventions: blood pressure medications, cholesterol medications, advice about diet and exercise. The other group was given no interventions. The study shows that while risk factors were improved, the number of deaths including from heart disease was actually higher in the intervention group. In other words, the standard interventions ultimately had the reverse effect of what was intended. Something in the standard treatments isn’t right.

From the book:

One [study] that did seem to support the “healthy” recommendations was a Finnish trial involving 1,222 men published in 1985. Men in the intervention group were seen regularly and advised about diet, physical activity and smoking. Those with high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels were treated with drugs. The men in this group did as they were advised and, as a result, the “predicted risks” for CHD were halved during the trial. It was hailed as a great success because: “The program markedly improved risk factor status.” In other words, they succeeded in changing their subjects’ diets, and so on. In December 1991, the results of a 15-year follow-up to that trial were published. During this period the intervention group had continued to be instructed on diet, smoking and exercise and treated for high blood pressure and cholesterol when present. Were they healthier? Did they live longer? The results are show in the table:

Deaths during 15-year follow-up
Intervention group Control group
Total deaths 67 46
Heart disease deaths 34 14

These figures show that not only did those who continued to follow the carefully controlled, cholesterol-lowering diet had more deaths in total, they were also more than twice as likely to die of heart disease as those who didn’t – some success!

Dr Michael Oliver, Professor of Cardiology at Edinburgh University’s Cardiovascular Research Unit, commenting on these results in the British Medical Journal, wrote that:

This runs counter to the recommendations of many national and international advisory bodies which must now take the recent findings from Finland into consideration. Not to do so may be ethically unacceptable. We must now face the fact that the evidence from large, well conducted trials gives little support to hopes that altering the lifestyle of the community at large, when started in middle age, will reduce cardiac deaths or total mortality.

References:
Barry Groves. Trick And Treat – how ‘healthy eating’ is making us ill. 2008.
Barry Groves’ site: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/
Miettinen TA et al. Multifactorial Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Diseases in Middle-aged Men, JAMA. 1985;254(15):2097-2102.
Strandberg TE, et al. Long-term Mortality After 5-Year Multifactorial Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Diseases in Middle-aged Men, JAMA. 1991;266(9):1225-1229.
Oliver MF. Doubts about preventing coronary heart disease. BMJ 1992; 304: 393-4.

Roxann Higuera
November 30, 2011
Research
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An interesting dietary study from 1931

There was an interesting dietary study done in 1931. They conducted a controlled dietary trial using a large variety of diets, ranging from 800 to 2,700 calories. Before they did that, they put all patients on a 1,000 calorie diet of varying types. Here are the stats for the average daily losses for the 1,000 calorie diets:

High-carbohydrate/low-fat – 49 grams
High-carbohydrate/low-protein – 122 grams
Low-carbohydrate/high-protein – 183 grams
Low-carbohydrate/high-fat – 205 grams

In other words, the patients on the low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet lost 4 times what those on the high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet lost. In another commentary on this diet, Barry Groves said that some patients actually gained weight on the high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet.

It was expected that on the 1,700 and 2,700 calorie diets, patients would not lose weight. In fact, all but three did lose weight.

In their conclusion, Lyon and Dunlop said: “The most striking feature … is that the losses appear to be inversely proportionate to the carbohydrate content of the food. Where the carbohydrate intake is low the rate of loss in weight is greater and conversely.”

Barry Groves says in Trick and Treat that the high-fat diet is preferable over the high-protein diet because excess protein creates waste products that stress the organs such as the kidneys. Fat burns cleaner in the body.

References:
Lyon DM, Dunlop DM. The treatment of obesity: a comparison of the effects of diet and of thyroid extract. Quart J Med 1932; 1: 331.
Barry Groves. Trick And Treat – how ‘healthy eating’ is making us ill. 2008.
Barry Groves’ site: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/

Roxann Higuera
November 19, 2011
Diet Plans, Research
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Why meat must be part of our diet

Prehistoric Hunters
Prehistoric Hunters in a Cave Painting

Vegetarians and vegans like to tell us that we should eat a largely carbohydrate diet. I disagree. They like to say that our diet should resemble that of gorillas and chimpanzees since they are supposedly our nearest evolutionary relatives. But our digestive systems are very different from theirs. Barry Groves explores those differences at length in an article on his site. Our digestive system resembles that of carnivores more than it does that of herbivores.

Dense carbohydrates are a very recent addition to the human diet. Agriculture did not occur until about 10,000 years ago; and in some areas such as northernEurope, agriculture did not arrive until about 5,000 years ago. Prior to that, humans were hunter/gatherers. Modern day hunter/gatherer diets tend to be largely meat-based with a preference for the fattiest portions. It is clear from the bone piles found at sites where prehistoric human remains have been found that the prehistoric diet included a lot of meat as well. Their cave paintings depict hunting, not agriculture. And the bones of those prehistoric humans showed that they were much healthier than us. They were taller, and they did not suffer from degenerative diseases such as arthritis. Those in the northern climates particularly would have been eating a meat diet because the ice age would not have allowed much vegetation to grow.

On the other hand, arthritis, obesity, and heart disease are apparent in Egyptian mummies, a society where grains predominated.

References:
Barry Groves. Should all animals eat a high-fat, low-carb diet? (This article compares our digestive system with herbivores and carnivores.)

Roxann Higuera
October 14, 2011
Paleo Diet, Research
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