Debbie says:
From the department of we-weren’t-surprised-were-you, comes this story. The article at the link has the familiar half-disturbed, half-smug tone. (“Oh, no! You don’t mean that fat people aren’t all killing themselves?” “Oh, no! We’ll find another way to spin this tale so that fat is still bad for you.”) The story itself, however, says just about what we’ve known all along: some fat people have high cholesterol and other heart disease risk factors, and so do some thin people. Some fat people don’t, and some thin people don’t.
You have to dig a little to find the real study, which turns out to be yet another spin-off of the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Studies), which ended in 2004 and provided a lot of reasonably (but not unimpeachably) good data on American eating habits. This particular piece tracked 5400 people, and here’s the conclusion: “Among US adults, there is a high prevalence of clustering of cardiometabolic abnormalities among normal-weight individuals and a high prevalence of overweight and obese individuals who are metabolically healthy.”
Yes.
To go along with this excellent news, we have the ever-impressive Sandy Szwarc, making sure we know what the media has not been telling us: a highly-respected new metadata analysis from an international group (The Cochrane Collaboration) has reviewed over 10,000 Type II diabetes studies, and found … no data worth the pixels they are printed in.
Despite all of the claims for the benefits of various dietary and lifestyle interventions for type 2 diabetes, none of them are yet supportable by quality evidence. The Cochrane reviewers expressed concern about the lack of hard, clinical endpoints in research to date and said there is a need for future researchers to “take care to record and publish mortality data, changes or delays in medication needs and quality of life, as these are the outcomes of importance to people with type 2 diabetes.”
Lots more at the link: Sandy is always thorough, careful, and clear.