The Paleo Diet Makes You Fatter?

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

Journalism used to be a semirespectable profession, one that required expertise in one’s “beat.”

Sportswriters needed know a hot box from a hat trick. Fashion columnists, a bishop sleeve from a dolman.

And science reporters were required to have some ability to distinguish well-conducted research from junk science.

But in 2016, one can wake, as I did today, and find the following headlines spewed across media outlets on the Interwebs:

The stories were about a new study from the University of Melbourne in Australia, in which one group of fat, prediabetic mice were put on a low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet, theoretically similar to a paleo-style diet.¹ Another was kept on a normal diet.

In eight weeks, the LCHF group got even fatter. Their glucose tolerance got worse, and their insulin levels went up relative to the controls.

“Low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets are becoming more popular, but there is no scientific evidence that these diets work,” said Associate Professor Sof Andrikopoulos, president of the Australian Diabetes Society, in the press release that the stories above were based upon.

The only problem with this study…

It’s So Aggressively Wrong, I Don’t Know Where to Start…

There are three blindingly obvious reasons this study from the University of Melbourne says virtually nothing about how human beings should eat. Specifically:

It Used Mice: Mice are naturally herbivorous, preferring (and adapted to) eating fruit, grains, and seeds. Many human societies, conversely, have eaten high-fat, low-carb diets for generations, selecting for genes that can thrive on such diets. Mouse studies occupy the lowest rung of nutrition studies when it comes to applicability to humans.

That Ate Mouse Chow: Mice don’t eat steak and broccoli voluntarily, so this study — like most nutrition studies that use rodents — fed the critters a special mouse chow.

The control mice got a chow made of relatively natural mouse foods: stuff like wheat, wheat germ, fish meal, and molasses. Not ideal, but vastly superior to the experimental LCHF diet, which was an unholy blend of god-awful ingredients including canola oil (likely GMO), casein (a milk protein that’s commonly allergenic), sucrose (yup, pure sugar is typically part of low-carb mouse chow), cellulose (possibly from wood pulp), and a witches’ brew of chemicals including potassium dihydrogen phosphate, potassium citrate, and choline chloride.

This awful mess bears no resemblance to a healthful paleo diet consisting of organic meats, fruits, and vegetables and could have stimulated the poor mice’s weight gain in any number of ways unrelated to its fat content per se.

And It Contradicts Better Studies on Humans: Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt has carefully compiled no fewer than 19 high-quality studies that point to the healthful effects of low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets (and note here that the term “high fat” is always relative — technically, it should be higher-fat than current low-fat recommendations).

These were conducted on my favorite mammalian species — human beings. Studies like these led a distinguished international group of physicians, in the prestigious journal Nutrition, to urge the use of a low-carb diet as the primary intervention for people with Type 2 diabetes.²

The limitations of this study should leap out at any science journalist with even a modest claim to the title. Particularly egregious is the headline above that contends the mouse study “proves” paleo leads to weight gain.

For the record, no study “proves” anything. One study can support a given conclusion. Many good studies, such as Dr. Eenfeldt has assembled, can strongly suggest a given conclusion is correct.

Good scientists, and good science journalists, are generally allergic to the term “proof.” And this study in particular proves zilch.

Bottom Line

Expect more paleo-bashing studies like this in the coming months and years. Low-carb, high-fat diets threaten to crush profit margins for multinational corporations peddling grain-based foods. There’s no clear evidence those companies were behind this study, but I guarantee they are planning similar efforts.

So don’t trust this bad mouse study — or any mouse study — as the basis of your decision about how to eat. Clinical or epidemiological studies of human beings are the basic currency of good nutrition science. I stand by my high-fat, real-food diet.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

1. A low-carbohydrate high-fat diet increases weight gain and does not improve glucose tolerance, insulin secretion or |[beta]|-cell mass in NZO mice. Nutrition & Diabetes. 2016

2. Feinman RD, Pogozelski WK, Astrup A, et al. Dietary carbohydrate restriction as the first approach in diabetes management: critical review and evidence base. Nutrition. 2015