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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the science-is-hard dept.

Errors Trigger Retraction Of Study On Mediterranean Diet's Heart Benefits

Ask just about anybody, and you'll probably hear that a healthy diet is one full of fruits and vegetables, olive oil, nuts and fish — what's called Mediterranean diet. A lot of research has suggested people who eat this way tend to be healthier, but it's been harder to prove whether that is because of the diet or some other factor. So in 2013, many took notice of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that seemed to provide some proof. The study found that people eating the Mediterranean diet supplemented with olive oil were 30 percent less likely to experience a heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes than people assigned to a low-fat diet. People who stuck with a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts had a 28 percent lower risk than those asked to follow a low-fat diet.

The results got wide media attention, including from NPR. But the New England Journal of Medicine retracted the paper Wednesday because of problems in the way the study was carried out. [...] The authors of the NEJM paper are replacing the 2013 paper with a corrected version that shows people following the diet had a similarly reduced level of heart attacks and strokes. The major change is softer language about the conclusions. The revised paper says only that people eating the Mediterranean diet had fewer strokes and heart attacks, not, as the original paper claimed, that the diet was the direct cause of those health benefits.

Anesthesiologist Dr. John Carlisle published an analysis of clinical studies in 2012 that led to the retraction of over 160 papers by Dr. Yoshitaka Fujii due to improper randomization of study participants. He began applying his method to thousands of other studies, including 934 in the New England Journal of Medicine. He flagged 11 of them, including the 2013 Mediterranean diet paper. The lead author of the paper confirmed that there were problems with randomization in the study:

It turns out approximately 14 percent of the more than 7,400 study participants hadn't been assigned randomly to either the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one. When couples joined the study together, both had been picked to follow the same diet. At one of the 11 participating study sites, the lead investigator had assigned the same diet to an entire village and didn't tell the rest of the investigators.

"This affected only a small part of the trial," says Martínez González. When the researchers reanalyzed the data excluding the nonrandomized people, the results were the same, he adds. Still, because everybody wasn't randomly assigned to different groups, the study can no longer claim the diet directly caused those health benefits. "We need to tone down the results, but it is just a little bit," he says.

Five other papers were corrected, but not retracted.

Also at Science Magazine.


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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Gaaark on Saturday June 16 2018, @10:13AM (2 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday June 16 2018, @10:13AM (#693904) Journal

    Just go paleo.
    eo-eo
    eo-eo
    eo-eo
    Just go paleo.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by looorg on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:26AM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:26AM (#693915)

    Good news, I never really liked to have waste amounts of red wine and olive oil on all my meals anyway ... Now I can go back to steak and whiskey.

  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @12:03PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @12:03PM (#693925)

    I concluded that I was going to die, so eat anything I feel like. Mostly good tasting stuff. I suppose I'll die one of these days, but it was a good life. Good food, good friends, good fun.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @01:47PM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @01:47PM (#693940)

      a stroke won't necessarily kill you.
      my grandfather lived for 13 years after his stroke, half paralized. couldn't speak (he had 2 or 3 things that he could say), couldn't go to the bathroom by himself, etc.
      my family was somehow able to handle it. if you're gonna go big on cholesterol, make sure you have enough people who truly love you.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @02:32PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @02:32PM (#693949)

        But suicide from the depression of living off of rice cakes and purified water will. Besides, I run mountains for an hour a day and will more likely die from a fall.

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @03:23PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @03:23PM (#693971)

          Rice cakes and purified water? The diet fad now is eating steak, chicken, eggs, bacon, nuts, and salad while drinking vodka, whiskey, and spiked seltzers. Just cut out all the grains and sugar the government tries to get you to eat.

          • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:13PM (1 child)

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:13PM (#693990) Journal

            Well, sugars anyway. Grains aren't bad in moderation. A slice of bread is good, now and then. I like fresh baked bread!

            • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:01PM

              by Gaaark (41) on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:01PM (#694014) Journal

              Try gluten free bread. You'll stop eating bread. :P
              :)

              I order my burgers lettuce wrapped and without the bun, even if they offer a gluten free bun. Hate to ruin a good burger with a GF bun.

              --
              --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:11PM (1 child)

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:11PM (#693989) Journal

          Falling is a decent way to die. Sheer terror for fifteen, thirty, ninety second - well, how far are you planning to fall? It can take awhile to fall if you jump from an airliner. You could even die of a heart attack before you hit the ground.

          • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:57PM

            by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:57PM (#694050) Homepage Journal

            My first wife was Czechoslovakian. And their government told an unbelievable story. About how one of their ladies fell from a jet. Tens of thousands of feet, and she lived. And the Guinness Book believed it. But many people say it's fake news. That she fell, she didn't fall that far. Because it wasn't terrorists, her own people shot her down by mistake.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:16PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:16PM (#694018) Journal

        The thing to remember is that the studies implicating dietary cholesterol are very weak. Moderate exercise is probably a lot more important that avoiding dietary cholesterol. Try to walk some every day, and if you can enjoy it, go on a small hike most weekends. Or find some other exercise you enjoy, and do that. The enjoyment is crucial, because you need to keep it up, and being happy is also good for you.

        FWIW, I normally eat lots of eggs, and my normal problem with cholesterol is that it's too low. This clearly isn't a dietary problem, and there doesn't seem to be any way to successfully address it. (I'm sensitive to high levels of niacin. This isn't unusual, but it makes niacin unsuitable for treating the cholesterol problem.) Cholesterol is a normal product of the metabolism, and is needed to sheathe the high-speed neurons. And *I believe* that when you eat cholesterol it's digested into a simpler form before being absorbed by the body. (I've never figured out how to check this out. Just now a quick check of Google neither confirmed nor refuted the assumption...or at least I couldn't really decide that it had. It may have confirmed it.)

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
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