By George Henderson and Grant Schofield Disclaimer – we’re not recommending that people eat red meat in preference to white meat, anymore than we think people should eat red peppers instead of onions. A mixed diet of various types of animal and plant foods, as close to nature as is consistent with good hygiene, good […]

The case study is a very important type of medical publication that’s overlooked in this age of big data. Unlike large statistical studies, which tell you the probability of something happening, the case study tells you whether something CAN happen at all, and under exactly which circumstances it has happened. Case studies answer questions like […]

By George Henderson and Grant Schofield There are few diet trials published from New Zealand, so we’re always keen to see them; and there are even fewer vegan diet trials. We are even more interested when they go beyond their data, and start in on a sort of zealot approach to running down low carb diets […]

In our last post, we went into a lot of detail about specific types of saturated fat and their effects on HDL. Here, we’ll try to summarise that information, and highlight some interesting conclusions, in simpler language. But first, a short chemistry lesson. Nothing too hard, hopefully – we’ll just focus on the main dietary […]

The nutrients that raise and lower HDL and ApoA1. So is getting your HDL high a good thing?  It probably depends if you earned it or not…..and what you eat especially myristic acid This very interesting study from 2014 brings into focus many of our recent posts about HDL, TG/HDL, ApoB/ApoA1 in the context of […]

If anyone’s interested in the public health nutrition debate around the dietary guidelines, then here’s a summary and critique of our latest jousting round(s) with conventional wisdom. In late 2016, an article from New Zealand in defense of the current dietary guidelines was published in the renowned medical journal The Lancet. While the authors (who included Prof […]

How much evidence do you need to make recommendations about what the public should eat? It depends really. “On fair evidence we might take action on what appears to be an occupational hazard. For example, we might change from a probably carcinogenic oil to a non-carcinogenic oil in a limited environment and without too much […]

Yesterday this headline appeared in Stuff. Included in the article was a claim from Prof Rod Jackson that “Butter consumption has increased and the underlying cause of heart disease is a diet high in saturated fat.” Kiwis follow advice of advocates for high-fat, low-carb diets, who promote foods such as coconut oil and butter, to […]

By George Henderson and Grant Schofield If you have a standard lipid test done in New Zealand and most other parts of the world, it will usually give a couple of ratios at the bottom. One of these is the fasting triglyceride-to-HDL cholesterol ratio. It can also be calculated from the other measurements using this […]

We recently had this letter on salt and hypertension published in the British journal, The Lancet.[1] It’s unusual for the Lancet to publish favourable references to low carbohydrate diets. They tend to publish material supporting statins and fat-restricted dietary guidelines instead (thus setting up a series of controversies with the more reformist British Medical Journal. […]