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    Olive Oil Can Tap Dance
    Olive Oil Can Tap Dance
    Olive Oil Can Tap Dance
    Ebook227 pages2 hours

    Olive Oil Can Tap Dance

    By Zoe Harcombe

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    About this ebook

    This eBook is a collection of short articles and blog posts covering topics such as 'Cholesterol and heart disease - there is a relationship, but it's not what you think'; 'How medical studies are manipulated'; 'Five-a-day - is it enough?'; 'Who's teaching our children about 'nutrition'?'; 'Statins with your burger? Better add a pregnancy test too' and many others. The articles challenge conventional wisdom in nutrition and health and take a critical look at the conflicts of interest surrounding how food and drugs are positioned.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZoe Harcombe
    Release dateDec 19, 2013
    ISBN9781907797408
    Olive Oil Can Tap Dance
    Author

    Zoe Harcombe

    Zoë’s passion is her vocation. Zoë spends her time researching and writing about obesity, diets and weight loss and she works exclusively in this field. She is author of the best selling book "Stop Counting Calories and Start Losing Weight", which was the follow-up to "Why do you overeat? When all you want is to be slim". The result of 20 years’ research into the causes of overeating, Zoë’s books go against traditional diet advice and are the first to address the three fundamental medical conditions that cause food cravings and therefore the compulsion to overeat. This understanding has helped tens of thousands of people lose weight quickly, easily and healthily through The Harcombe Diet approach. Zoë was the first person from her state school to graduate from Cambridge University. The paradox of escalating obesity and overwhelming desire to be slim has been a constant fascination to her and she set out to try to understand the obesity epidemic in the late 1980's, when UK obesity rates had just hit double figures. By the end of the millennium, UK obesity rates were 22.6% and 25.8% for men and women respectively and have worsened further since. By studying nutrition and, more importantly, by questioning every principle taught in nutrition and public health dietary advice, Zoë has found virtually every 'fact' to be anything but. From misapplying thermodynamics to five-a-day having no evidence base; from 1lb not equalling 3,500 calories to our eat less/do more advice being fundamentally flawed, very little has stood up to scrutiny. Zoë's most hardback book "The Obesity Epidemic: What caused it? How can we stop it?" is the presentation of what we have got wrong and the evidence for what would be right.

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    Book preview

    Olive Oil Can Tap Dance - Zoe Harcombe

    Olive oil can tap dance

    by Zoë Harcombe

    Olive Oil Can Tap Dance

    Copyright © Zoë Harcombe 2013

    Published by Columbus Publishing Ltd at Smashwords 2013

    Epub edition

    www.columbuspublishing.co.uk

    ISBN 978-1-907797-40-8

    Zoë Harcombe has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Typesetting by Raffaele Bolelli Gallevi

    Brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

    All links to external sources were correct at the time of writing each post. Some may have changed since

    The information provided in this book should not be construed as personal medical advice or instruction. No action should be taken based solely on the contents of this book.

    Readers should consult appropriate health professionals on any matter relating to their health and well being.

    The information and opinions provided here are believed to be accurate and sound and are based on the best judgments of the author, but readers who fail to consult appropriate health authorities assume the risk of any injuries. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible or liable for any loss or claim arising from the use, or misuse, of the content of this book.

    Table of Contents

    Introduction

    How medical studies are manipulated

    Kellogg’s Coco Pops Advert

    Kellogg’s Special K Mini Breaks

    Olive Oil can Tap Dance!

    The calorie myth & eating 36,000 calories a day

    Weight Watchers works – according to a study funded by Weight Watchers

    Statins with your burger? Better add a pregnancy test too

    Surgery is better than dieting, says conflicted doctor

    One in ten adults dangerously obese…

    Weight Watchers ProPoints plan – what’s it all about?

    Cholesterol & heart disease – there is a relationship, but it’s not what you think

    The White Paper on Public Health (Andrew Lansley)

    UK Women are the World’s Worst Dieters

    Red meat & cancer & very bad journalism

    Five-a-day – is it enough?!

    Bariatric Surgery: What’s it all about?

    MyPlate – the new American USDA food pyramid

    Who’s teaching our children about ‘nutrition’?

    The Vegetarian Myth – Lierre Keith

    Red meat & diabetes?

    Nutrition – where will a student be taught the truth?

    Introduction

    Probably my best blogging experience was waking up on the morning of March 14th 2012 to find that one of my heroes had commented on one of my blog posts overnight. The comment was Hi Zoe My simple comment: nice job. Thanks gt. gt stood for Gary Taubes! I had posted a blog the day before entitled Red meat & mortality & the usual bad science and I'd had one of those 'viral' moments when it seemed I'd been one of the first to cover a breaking story and my analysis was widely shared.

    That's what makes blogging so rewarding. We all have things that we want to say and we all want to counter bad science when we see it. The internet generally and blogging particularly have given the little person a voice (and I am little!) We don't just have to take things 'put out there' any more - we can answer back and then other people can share what we do, so that we can punch above our weight.

    I started blogging in 2007, but it tended to be brief comments about something in the media, which needed addressing. I started blogging in earnest - or should that be in anger?! - in 2010 and I found myself putting serious time and effort into tracking down conflicts of interest, locating medical journal articles to dissect the original data, finding links that would help other people researching each topic and so on.

    Over the next three years, I came to see the same tricks over and over again - manipulating 'research' to make a desired point. As Einstein famously said - If you know what you're looking for it isn't research. The tricks played in presenting data in a misleading way are summarised in the opening chapter - this is not on open view anywhere on my sites. I hope that you enjoy it and I hope that it helps you to dissect studies in the way that I enjoy doing.

    This book is a collection of my blog posts on www.zoeharcombe.com from February 2010 to September 2011. There are 20 in total - comprising approximately 40,000 words. They are on open view on my blog, but we have pulled together this book so that you can read them at your convenience off-line. This is the first of a series of books collating my blog posts in this way - look out for the others.

    This first collection of blogs includes a classic post on the true relationship between cholesterol and heart disease. Conditions from diabetes to cancer are covered. We look at bariatric surgery and conflicts of interest. Kellogg's get a bashing and Weight Watchers doesn't fare much better. But then nor does the English health minister. Is the USA dietary advice any better? Does the calorie formula hold? What's the deal with five-a-day? And who's indoctrinating our children - and nutritional students? If you want to win an argument with a vegetarian - it's all in this book.

    Thank you for reading this and for not simply accepting the nonsense that is spouted by our governments and their advisors. I hope one day that they will be sued for what they have done to their fellow humans. Until then - bloggers will keep blogging.

    How medical studies are manipulated

    This article was inspired by an article that appeared in the media on Monday 31st October 2011. (Link) The original journal article was actually accepted in July and published in August, so I’m not sure why it was suddenly ‘hot news’ on Halloween (Link). The Daily Mail article opened with: A daily dose of drugs designed to lower cholesterol could also slash the risk of breast cancer recurring, say researchers. They found that women who had developed a breast tumour were nearly 30 per cent less likely to suffer a relapse if they took a type of statin called simvastatin.

    Normally, I can see through ‘research’ in a few seconds and at least know the game that has been played straight away. I must admit that this one baffled me. Every common sense bone in one’s body says – the opposite would be the case. Healthy cells need cholesterol, cancerous cells need even more cholesterol – how can there even be an association between taking statins and cancer reoccurrence? I circulated the original study and the Daily Mail report amongst The International Network of Cholesterol Sceptics (thincs.org) and got the response within an hour or so. It made me think that it would be beneficial to document all the tricks being played on us – not just on Halloween, but every day of the year.

    Before we look at the tricks, let’s just remind ourselves of the two main types of study:

    Types of studies

    There are two main types of studies – a) epidemiological and b) clinical trials.

    a) An epidemiological study is one that looks at populations. This kind of study gathers data on different groups of people and then tries to look for patterns and differences between those populations. The populations can be small (a few people) or entire countries. Epidemiological studies can only suggest association, but they may throw up interesting observations that will help to focus further research.

    The Seven Countries Study was an epidemiological study. Such studies don’t have to be done on a whole country basis and indeed are often more helpful when done on a section of a population basis. Hence, the Seven Countries Study included people from the countries Finland (2), Greece (2), Holland (1), Italy (3), Japan (2), USA (1) and Yugoslavia (5). There were 16 regions studied within these countries (the number of regions studied in each country is in brackets). We call a population being studied in an epidemiological study a cohort. So there were 16 cohorts in the Seven Countries Study.

    Epidemiology is a useful and interesting science, but not an end in itself. It should suggest connections to be investigated further, but not make assertions about causation. You can see that it has the potential to be abused and misinterpreted all the time. As examples, we can observe that approximately 64% of Greek men smoke and 36.7% of UK men smoke. (Link) We could observe in parallel that the national debt of Greece is higher than the national debt of the UK. We would be unlikely to try to connect these two pieces of information (unless we tried to argue that Greece was less productive as a nation because of cigarette breaks!) However, if we observed in comparison data that Greek death rates were substantially higher than those in the UK, we could suspect that smoking has something to do with dying and investigate this further.

    b) Clinical trials are studies where a specific intervention is made to test a hypothesis. Usually there is one group of people called the control group and one group of people called the intervention group. The control group either has nothing done to it, or is given a placebo (dummy medication in effect), so that they don’t know that they are NOT being treated. The intervention group is ‘treated’. In rare studies, there are more than two groups. As an example – one group may have no change in diet, group two may have fish oil added to their diet and group three may have olive oil added to their diet. This would be done to see if either fish oil or olive oil is better than no oil. The more of the following components that a clinical trial has, the better it is considered to be:

    – Large numbers of people. Broadly speaking, the larger the study the better. If we compare two people and discover something, the chance of this being coincidental is quite high. If we observe a pattern in 100,000 people, this is more significant (statistically, as well as logically).

    – Randomly assigned people. Clinical trials should NOT be able to select which people go in which group otherwise bias could be introduced.

    – ‘Blind’ people. This means that people don’t know whether they are in the control group or the intervention group. It requires that (if the trial is about a new drug), both groups take a drug that looks the same, but one group is taking the actual drug and the other is taking a dummy pill. This overcomes the well known placebo effect – that people feel better just because they are being treated. Both groups should have similar placebo effects and then any real effects should be comparable. (You can see that it would be virtually impossible to have a ‘blind’ diet trial).

    – Double blind. This means that both the participants and the researchers don’t know who is taking which drug. A clinical trial sets out to test a hypothesis. Human nature says that we will look for what we are expecting. Hence if we think that a drug will lower blood pressure and we get what looks to be a surprise reading, we may try to dismiss it, exclude it or explain it away if the reading seems contrary to what we are expecting. If we don’t know if the reading for person 123 is someone on the drug or the placebo, we are less able to bias the results.

    – Only one thing should change. This is the most difficult one to achieve. The perfect trial would have group A given a drug and group B given a dummy and absolutely nothing else would change whatsoever – no change in diet, location, job, stress, happiness, marital status, family circumstance etc. Clearly this is impossible to achieve. The size of the study is assumed to help compensate for this. In a large study, with people randomly assigned, it is as likely that there were similar lifestyle changes in both groups, such that any impact of the drug should still stand out above this. However, many, if not most, of the studies that you will see are done on very small numbers.

    As an example, the June 2011 headlines, that low calorie diets could ‘cure’ diabetes came from a study of just 11 people (Link) This study illustrates another way in which a ‘clinical trial’ experiment can be done. An intervention can be done with one group of people and the rest of the population (in this article – the two and a half million other diabetics) can be considered the control group.

    That’s the basis structure of studies being undertaken in universities, hospitals, research centres and Research & Development (R&D) labs world-wide, right now. Here are the ways in which the studies can be manipulated:

    1) The funding of the study.

    This is the starting point and one of the most significant opportunities for bias. Studies are expensive. Drug studies are phenomenally expensive. Surgical studies even more expensive again. Someone has to fund these. The most likely funder is the pharmaceutical company. As a general rule, only those who stand to gain are going to spend a lot of money on research. Drug companies are in fact obliged to do clinical trials, before a drug can be approved and therefore have to fund these. Drug companies are also able to analyse the results and be involved at every stage of the process. As we will see in the following points, there are many ways in which data can be manipulated, exaggerated and/or excluded, which may be unethical, but sadly not illegal.

    Epidemiological studies are also extremely expensive and can be funded by governments, which may have a genuine interest in important discoveries. For example, if governments could prove that eating five portions of fruits and vegetables a day reduces the

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