Swedish Study ABC News Report Low Carb Diet Increases risk of heart disease

[B]Atkins-Like Diets may increase the risk of heart disease! [/B] was the headline.

[url=http://abcnews.go.com/Health/low-carbohydrate-high-protein-diets-increase-cardiovascular-disease/comments?type=story&id=16655359]Comments: Low Carbohydrate, High Protein Diets May Increase Cardiovascular Disease Risk - ABC News[/url]

[B]Amazingly the news reporter reported a 5% increase in risk, but lets say that the researchers and the reporter actually failed at math! lol.. here's why.[/B]

4 or 5 more cases out of 10,000 isn't 5% that is .05% or a tenth of a half of a percent. In the study 1270 of 43,000 women studied got heart disease total. So this includes the group that wasn't on the low carb diet. So, 2.7% of all women develop heart disease total and .05% of women on a low carb diet got heart disease. The study proves the opposite!

[B]A LOW FAT DIET IS 58.06 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO CAUSE HEART DISEASE[/B]. could have been another headline. Lets do the math. As the article suggested A total of 1270 women in the study of 43,0000 developed heart disease. 5 out of every 10,000 women on a low carbohydrate diet developed heart disease so that's 21.5 women out of the 43,000 on a low carb diet developed heart disease as apposed to 1270-21.5 (total low carb dieters) = 1248.5 women out of 43,000 women on no diet at all developing heart disease. 21.5/1248.5 or 21.5 to 1248.5 who observed no diet are 58 times more likely to have a heart attack on no particular diet. I can't believe that no one in this article did the math. If anything this should show people that it is unquestionable that a low carb diet is more healthy.

Out of embarrassment the writer of the ABC news should be submitting a new article.

The Swedish study referred to has been out for a while, and throughly criticized here and elsewhere.

[IMG]http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h187/ladytrue_99/assfire.gif[/IMG] OMG OMG! Give me grains and legumes! Feeling great has been a horrible mistake!

I didn't post this article for the benefit of the members of this site or to gain any notoriety or popularity. I posted this because I was at a dinner party a few weeks back and some well meaning person touted that a low carb diet wasn't healthy. So I google searched low carb and heart disease and this JUNK SCIENCE article was at the top of the charts. It angers me that so much mis-information is out there and receives so much attention. I found MARKS DAILY APPLE by googling "high fat diet". My thoughts are that we need to keep posting on here (and everywhere) until knowledge from this site becomes common knowledge to the point that Doctors, Insurance companies and general medicine understands what junk science is and won't feed us any more of it. This is so important as many of my nieghbors are on statins and insurance companies base giving us insurance based on our cholesterol level. This is so much more important than you and me knowing about it. I couldn't find a searchable post on Marks Daily Apple and since it seems to have a fairly high google rating i thought it would be worth while. Each time you post it increases the rating with Google, each time you comment, the rating goes up. So.. POST.. POST..POST! We'll know it's common knowledge when the top articles read. HIGH CHOLESTEROL HAS NO SIGNIFICANT EFFECT ON HEART DISEASE OR STROKE!

I've heard of this report too. Never saw it debunked mathmatically though. Good job.

--from Math Teacher gone paleo

[QUOTE=youmustvotenato;979225]I've heard of this report too. Never saw it debunked mathmatically though. Good job.

--from Math Teacher gone paleo[/QUOTE]

I think it's hilarious that the researchers went into the study to make a point, the evidence was contrary to their belief but they still try to prove the point that they wanted to make. Not true science when you plan for the outcome. We just don't get very many true studies anymore. What's more amazing is that the ABC writer didn't debunk the info before writing it. If I told you that 5 out of 10,000 people got heart disease or 5% you'd look at me funny and say go back and calculate it again. People don't read in much depth, most people stop at the headline and remember that.

[QUOTE=tgustus;975281][B]Amazingly the news reporter reported a 5% increase in risk, but lets say that the researchers and the reporter actually failed at math! lol.. here's why.[/B]

4 or 5 more cases out of 10,000 isn't 5% that is .05% or a tenth of a half of a percent. In the study 1270 of 43,000 women studied got heart disease total. So this includes the group that wasn't on the low carb diet. So, 2.7% of all women develop heart disease total and .05% of women on a low carb diet got heart disease. The study proves the opposite![/quote]
I'm not trying to defend the study since I think it's bad science. But your rebuttal and your mathematics are both flawed.

The 5% isn't an absolute increase in heart disease. It's a relative increase.

The article says that 1270 out of 43000 women get heart disease. That's 2.95% (not 2.7% as you say above). Now, IF the study is correct, and there is a 5% increased risk of CHD, then if this baseline risk of 2.95% increases by 5% to 3.1%. The study is NOT saying that the risk of CHD goes from 2.95% to 7.95%. If every woman on the study was eating LCHP, the study is saying that instead of 1270 women with CHD, the number would have been closer to 1333. So the study is saying that an extra 63 women would have gotten CHD if they were eating LCHP than otherwise.

[QUOTE=tgustus;975281][B]A LOW FAT DIET IS 58.06 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO CAUSE HEART DISEASE[/B]. could have been another headline. Lets do the math. [/quote]
Bzzt, wrong on two counts. Firstly, the article is talking about low carb high protein. Not fat. Then it already says that there is a 5% increase. So that means that the LCHP diet is 1.05 times more likely to cause heart disease. Not 58.06 times.

Your right..I'm not sure where 2.7% came from. My arguement was that there wasn't a 5% as they suggested.. this was pulled out of the air. .. It would be nice to have the actual numbers from the study since we are using a pretty fuzzy explanation. Taken from the article "[B]The actual number of women who developed heart disease was small -- about four or five extra cases per 10,000 women per year" [/B] this is a very confusing statement because it was a study of 43000 women and.. the study went over 16 years. So right away we actually don't have the right numbers here at all. 4 or 5 more out of every 10,000 is still 21.5 out of the 43,000 studied, so then if it was extra the numbers would be more like. 624 to 646 That 21.5/1270 really represents 1.7% increase.. Overall this isn't significant. Instead they should have said that there was really[B] no significant increase at all[/B]. Not the smoking gun they were looking for. It would be nice to have the real numbers from the study instead of the vague explanation.

[QUOTE=tgustus;980110]Your right..I'm not sure where 2.7% came from. My arguement was that there wasn't a 5% as they suggested.. this was pulled out of the air. .. It would be nice to have the actual numbers from the study since we are using a pretty fuzzy explanation. Taken from the article "[B]The actual number of women who developed heart disease was small -- about four or five extra cases per 10,000 women per year" [/B] this is a very confusing statement because it was a study of 43000 women and.. the study went over 16 years. So right away we actually don't have the right numbers here at all. 4 or 5 more out of every 10,000 is still 21.5 out of the 43,000 studied, so then if it was extra the numbers would be more like. 624 to 646 That 21.5/1270 really represents 1.7% increase.. Overall this isn't significant. Instead they should have said that there was really[B] no significant increase at all[/B]. Not the smoking gun they were looking for. It would be nice to have the real numbers from the study instead of the vague explanation.[/QUOTE]

The full text of the article is available here: [url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383863/]Low carbohydrate-high protein diet and incidence of cardiovascular diseases in Swedish women: prospective cohort study[/url]

43,396 women total were studied. In total, 1270 women had cardiovascular events. Table 3 shows that, as protein intake increases relative to carbohydrates, the incidence rate of cardiovascular disease increases.

So it looks like, from the numbers, they did get an increase in cardivascular disease from an increase in protein. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's necessarily the weakness of the study. It's probably this:

"We formed 11 food groups from the food items: vegetables, legumes, fruits and nuts, dairy products, cereals, [i]meat and meat products[/i], fish and seafood, potatoes, eggs, sugars and sweets (all measured in g/day), and non-alcoholic beverages (measured in mL/day)."

"What kind of meat products?" you might ask. Well... they don't bother to look at that. Grassfed and finished beef would be a meat product... but so would a Mc Donald's burger I'm sure, and I'm also sure that a much higher percentage of the women studied were eating McDonald's burgers than grass finished beef.

Also note their conclusion: Low carbohydrate-high protein diets, used on a regular basis and [i]without consideration of the nature of carbohydrates or the source of proteins[/i], are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

So eating trans-fatty, processed burgers and a little white bread on the side leads to higher incidence rates of cardiovascular disease? Shocking! Easting grass fed beef with a side of beets, asparagus and spinach is analogous to a McDonalds burger? ... I don't know about that.

Heart disease is caused by high homocysteine, not fat nor cholesterol. High homocysteine is due to insufficient B vitamins in relation to the amount of animal proteins consumed. B vitamins comes from leafy greens. So if you are consuming an all meat diet with no leafy greens, it may result in high homocysteine and hence an increased risk of heart disease. However, if you consume meat protein sufficient for your body's needs and consume sufficient B vitamins from vegetables, then there should be no increased risk.

I know this may not be what the paleo crowd wants to hear. But [URL="http://blissfulwriter.hubpages.com/hub/Why-You-Should-Get-Your-Homocysteine-Levels-Checked"]here is the scope on homocystiene[/URL].

And granted there is B12 in red meat and eggs. And I do eat those as well as adopt a paleo-like diet. However, I also make sure I get sufficient leafy greens (at least as much as meat in volume). My plate is half veggies and half animal products.