Prezi Classic Support. Sorry, no results matched this search. Truth in Olive Oil. Olive oil is a supremely healthy food. Olive oil is 9. 8% fat. Masters of Sex is an American period drama television series that premiered on September 29, 2013, on Showtime. It was developed by Michelle Ashford and loosely based. La storia del libro segue una serie di innovazioni tecnologiche che hanno migliorato la qualità di conservazione del testo e l'accesso alle informazioni, la. They overhung the archway, thrust themselves between the bars of the great gate with a sweet welcome to passers-by, and lined the avenue, winding through lemon trees. Many people find these two statements mutually exclusive. Still under the spell of the anti- fat propaganda that filled our food airwaves and dominated the nutritional discussion in the 1. If olive oil is mostly fat, how can it be healthy?” I’ve considered this problem briefly – the fact is, not all fats are created equal, and extra virgin olive oil is much more than fat alone – but it’s time to debunk this widely popular fat fetish in detail. In this guest column, Hob takes on one of the more insidious attacks on olive oil’s healthfulness. Insidious, because it bears a patina of scientific method and academic credibility, beneath which lie glaring errors of logic and science, and an extreme anti- fat agenda that’s often aimed at selling the Pritikin Diet and similar dietary regimens. You’re not alone. The diet wars and the product labels leave many people’s heads spinning, and it often seems like even the experts can’t agree — that is, if you can figure out who the real experts are. So it’s no surprise that many people have had their confidence in the healthfulness of one of the world’s few true health foods undermined by an oft- recycled article that claims that olive oil is bad for you. What are we to make of this? The Elephant Evacuated from the Room. Let’s start with the kind of evidence that the article does not present in its attack. Yes, the article discusses some studies carried out on laboratory animals. And yes, it also includes some studies involving humans, albeit of very particular and limited sorts (and as we’ll see, not always accurately- presented). But as most of us know, the gold standard of scientific evidence — the thing that gives us the strongest proof that something is true or false in the world of health — is the randomized clinical trial, or RCT. Meanwhile, the rest of the people in the study (the “control group”) receive an alternative intervention that the scientists think will not be effective (such as a sugar pill) or against which they want to test the new intervention (such as an older, established drug). In a true RCT, the scientists take steps to make sure that even though individual people are assigned to the treatment or the control by random processes, the two groups contain similar numbers of people with different personal characteristics, such average age, mix of men and women, number of overweight and obese people, exercise habits, and so on. Then the two groups continue to receive the therapy or the stand- in treatment for several years, to see how it will affect their health (rather than looking back after the fact and trying to piece together why some people developed heart disease and others remained healthy). The RCT is thus the strongest possible kind of evidence to bring to bear on the question of how a given intervention — a drug, a diet, an exercise regimen — really affects a person’s health, with all else being accounted for. ![]() ![]() In the balanced- but- random way of the best clinical trials, subjects allocated to groups that would be counseled to follow one of three diets. The key differences between the diets were around fat. The control diet was designed to be the kind of healthy but low- fat diet that the USDA and the American Heart Association used to recommend in the 1. Spanish cuisine), and so on. The other two were variants on the Mediterranean diet, and with a special emphasis on incorporating healthy fat sources. The researchers provided the volunteers with free supplies one of two healthy fat sources —either an ounce of mixed unsalted nuts daily, or a generous supply of extra- virgin olive oil — and lessons on how to use more of them in their diets. Still, people in all three arms of the trial improved their diets: whether assigned to low- fat advice, or to Mediterranean diet with nuts or with extra- virgin olive oil, all three groups improved their scores on a standard “Mediterranean diet” assessment, and cut back on saturated fat intake by 5- 1. ![]() Register for a free account and gain full access to Smashwords! Learn what we offer authors and readers!Spanish volunteers were already consuming significantly less saturated fat than typical Americans, Brits, or Australians when the study began. Additionally, people in the low- fat diet group cut back significantly on red and processed meat. But the biggest differences were in the two groups assigned to Mediterranean diets. The EVOO group increased their extra- virgin olive oil intake to about four tablespoons a day, while cutting their intake of refined olive and seed oils to almost zero. Meanwhile the group assigned to a Mediterranean diet with nuts consumed a bit less than an extra ounce of them a day. Both Mediterranean diet groups also became somewhat more regular consumers of red wine. This meant that (for instance) volunteers who had high levels of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol in their blood would get statins drugs to lower it — good medical care, but making extra- virgin olive oil’s ability to lower LDL a bit redundant.
![]() The same goes to a lesser extent for high blood sugar after eating a meal and high blood pressure: there’s evidence that EVOO can help to lower these risk factors, but because people with high levels of these risk factors got other medical treatment for them, EVOO’s comparative advantage was not given its full opportunity to shine. There is now a great deal of evidence that beneficial bioactive phenolic compounds present in extra- virgin olive oil mediate many of its benefits, with more powerful effects on things like blood pressure. As compared with people eating the basically healthy diet, people whose diets were enriched in EVOO or nuts suffered close to 3. Additionally, although the trend didn’t reach the standard statistical threshold for assurance, there was a pretty clear- looking trend for people consuming EVOO to die less often from any cause. And if someone wants to convince you to disregard a randomized, controlled clinical trial involving nearly 7,5. Spanish citizens consuming extra- virgin olive oil for five years, they’d better have some pretty good countervailing evidence up their sleeves. Instead, the low- fat diet advocates argue from studies in chimps, human studies run over the course of a few hours, some distortions of the evidence from human epidemiology, and what we might call fuzzy math. Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know. Let’s dig into it. Marginal. It says, “data from the Nurses Health Study, an on–going study from Harvard Medical School analyzing the habits and health of nearly 9. American diet.”. Now, the Nurses’ Health Study is a very important source of scientific information on diet and health that has been going on for decades, so its conclusions can’t be easily dismissed. But unlike PREDIMED, the Nurses’ Health Study is not a controlled trial, where volunteers are assigned in a structured, random- but- balanced way to follow different therapies (whether it’s a drug or a diet) to test the effect of changing just that one thing in people who are otherwise similar. Instead, it’s what’s called an observational study. In some such studies, volunteers also consent to letting the investigators see their medical records, or to collect blood samples or similar data. Then, the researchers leading the study follow up with the volunteers over the years to see how their health turns out, and use sophisticated statistical methods to try and tease out associations between health outcomes and parts of their previous self- directed lives. If people who chose to consume more coffee during the course of the study the study wind up getting Parkinson’s disease less often, is it because something in coffee is protective against the disease? ![]() Or is it because people who are genetically vulnerable to Parkinson’s don’t handle caffeine well, and thus avoid coffee? Or something else? That’s exactly why RCTs like PREDIMED are necessary. In fact, as things stand, they’re the best sources of information we have on most questions of lifestyle’s effects on health, exactly because clinical trials of foods and exercise plans are so hard to organize. But let’s be clear: no conclusion coming out of even the best observational study can be as reliable as the results of a 7. RCT. If the Evidence is Against You, Make Some Up. But wait: maybe this observational- vs- RCT ranking doesn’t even matter. ![]() ![]() Because the claim that the Nurses’ Health Study found only marginal benefits from olive oil consumption is hogwash! In part, it was because I have paid a lot of attention to this study over the years, and have also paid a lot of attention to olive oil research, and would be surprised if I had missed a key finding like the one that was being claimed. Moreover, for most of the other studies that the article claims to review, a citation back to the original scientific report on which it’s supposed to be based is given — but in this case, no such reference is provided. In fact, there is exactly zero data on the subject! I dug around in the medical literature to confirm this, and just to be sure I emailed Dr. Walter Willett, the respected epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health who has been running a section of it for almost a quarter of a century. He confirmed what I had suspected: the Nurses’ Health Study has never reported anything about olive oil and health in the entire four decades of its existence. Americans in general — and these nurses in particular — have historically consumed so little olive oil that it is unlikely that the tiny amounts present in their diets would have exerted any significant effect on their health. When the Nurses’ Health Study was launched in the 1. Americans were consuming the olive oil- rich diets of the Greeks of Crete, whose low incidence of heart disease sparked the interest of scientists in the Mediterranean diet in the first place, back in the middle of the last century. So looking to the nurse volunteers of this study for a sign of the potential health benefits of extra- virgin olive oil just doesn’t make sense. So what do the observational studies really show?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2017
Categories |