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. […]

HDL cholesterol is one of the strongest predictors of both cardiovascular and cancer risk. It’s especially useful as this association seems to have no genetic basis, which implies it’s a modifiable risk factor. All non-drug interventions that improve health, for example by lowering weight, blood sugar, or inflammatory markers also raise HDL, including low carb […]

By George Henderson and Grant Schofield Ancel Keys has become a kind of cartoon villain for dietary reformers for various reasons – allowing ecological epidemiological comparisons to dominate his thinking, attacking John Yudkin’s sugar hypothesis with made-up ecological claims, and basically (with a lot of help) bullying his rivals out of their labs and grants […]

Drs David Katz and Garth Davis are a good example of the type of crypto-vegan medical professional who believe in the power of the “plant based diet”. They have a knee jerk reaction to low carb diets, because they think these involve eating more meat. Here’s a news flash – you can eat more meat […]

Once again, the significance of a mouse study has been distorted by its authors and exaggerated by the media.  It grabbed our attention because it was the lead front page story in our national newspaper the New Zealand Herald, no less. Also, because we’ve been big advocates for lower carb intakes, especially for the insulin […]

In the news recently is a review of statin benefits and side-effects in the Lancet which, using a controversial modelling method to predict population effects from the variable results of clinical trials, recommends that statins be prescribed more widely to healthy people to lower their risk of future heart attacks.[1] The claim is that side-effects […]

In the latest Lancet, Yoni Freedhoff and Kevin Hall have an opinion piece about diet trials, in which they argue that it’s not helpful to know that an ad lib low-carb diet results in more weight loss than a calorie-restricted low-fat “dietary guidelines” type diet, because the weight loss differences are not clinically significant, a […]

This (very technical) paper has made a big splash on the internet and in the media, not just in New Zealand but all around the world. A thrifty variant in CREBRF strongly influences body mass index in Samoans Ryan L Minster, Nicola L Hawley, Chi-Ting Su, Guangyun Sun, Erin E Kershaw, Hong Cheng, Olive D […]