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Problem with the mother-in-law


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Just an attention-grabbing headline.

 

My mother-in-law is absolutely lovely and we get on really well. The 'problem' is she saw this article - http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/04/animal-protein-diets-smoking-meat-eggs-dairy - in the Guardian today and has freaked out. She's thinking about stopping her Whole 30 (she's on Day 5). I'm on Day 35 and I feel incredible, I don't want her stopping before she feels the benefits.

 

So what ammo can you guys give me against the results of this study? I was thinking that the animal protein that the study is talking about is probably factory farmed. So it's all the chemicals used in that process that is potentially causing the cancer. Am I on the right track?

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Having paid attention to food related reporting for almost 4 years now, I know that newspapers are the absolutely worst place to receive guidance about healthy eating. Reports consistently misrepresent scientific studies, typically emphasizing what makes a good headline without focusing on main points. Further, newspapers routinely present contradicting results over time as they find more studies to milk for attention. Give them some time and they will tell you a different story without ever acknowledging that they are now promoting a new view. Newspapers are notorious for popularizing studies that most scientists ignore because they consider it inconsequential. This raises another issue, all of us like to consider ourselves educated, but the truth is that scientific studies are typically so complicated that you need to be a scientist to debate their merits. Something that looks clear and convincing to an ordinary person may actually be thinly supported or even absolute trash when you understand how the study was designed or interpreted. Then there is a third issue. Scientific studies often have little to do with real science and lots to do with who is paying for the study or the strong opinions of the researcher. It is amazing how many contradictions can be found between studies when you dig deep into how they are done and who is doing them. 

 

I made a decision in 2010 to accept Dallas and Melissa Hartwig as my authorities on healthy eating and to let them filter through all the science to tell me what was important. I made that choice after testing them and studying how they worked for a few months. My satisfaction with the choice I made in 2010 has only gotten stronger as I have learned more. 

 

And unlike the 1000s of scientific studies out there, the Whole30 has tens of 1000s of real people reporting how their life was before and how life has become since they began eating Whole30-style. Many of us have been able to reduce or eliminate medications, feel better, sleep longer, perform better and continue to do so over the long-term. We know our results are real and are not the result of manipulating data to achieve a desired number on a screen. 

 

Actually, you are probably not on track blaming factory farmed food and chemicals. That is a problem for health, but probably not the reason this study has decided that eggs are worse than smoking tobacco. 

 

The newspaper report is new. Over the next month or so, probably 10 different paleo bloggers will analyse the report and explain how it is nonsense in detail. Personally, I am not taking the time to read the study because I lost interest in this kind of sensationalism about 3 years ago.

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Whole30 responded to this on their Facebook page yesterday. Here's what they said

 

 There were a few good rebuttals to that today, so I'll leave it to those folks to explain the why's, but long story short: this was an observational study of more than 6,000 people. There were no variables controlled for. There is no way to get any kind of causation from that kind of study, only correlation and salacious headlines.

http://robbwolf.com/2014/03/04/meat-bad-cigarettes/

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