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Why you shouldn’t get your information from news headlines
Publications (newspapers, magazines, and the like) make the bulk of their revenue from advertising. For advertisers to pay premium fees for exposure, journalists work hard in writing headlines that are catchy enough for people to buy the publication/subscription or click on them, depending on the format. That’s the main reason why you shouldn’t get your information from news headlines, or in other words, believe everything you read. I’ve chosen a recent piece of scientific literature that has had a significant impact in the past week or so. The full-text paper is available online (see references) and is entitled “Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study and meta-analysis.”. In…
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Low-carb or low-fat for weight loss? Whatevs!
This recently randomised clinical trial published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, Effect of Low-Fat vs Low-Carbohydrate Diet on 12-Month Weight Loss in Overweight Adults and the Association With Genotype Pattern or Insulin Secretion: The DIETFITS Randomized Clinical Trial, looked to answer the million dollar question: is low-carb or low-fat better for weight loss given particular participant characteristics? These characteristics were measured via certain genetic variations (SNPs in genes PPARG, ADRB2, and FABP2) that predispose an individual toward carbohydrate or fat metabolism, and also via insulin levels 30 minutes after a glucose challenge as a measure of insulin resistance. Pretty robust study design, in my opinion. The…
