Minger Does It Again
Denise Minger, who took apart the crap that is The China Study, blogged this: Brand-Spankin' New Study: Are Low-Carb Meat Eaters in Trouble?...neatly showing up sloppy-woppy, loosey-goosey on the science Dean Ornish, who blogged about about the study over at the HuffPo. Here's an excerpt from Minger summarizing some of the flaws in the study:

Bottom line: In this study, when you look closer at the data, differences in mortality appear to be unrelated to animal product consumption. Changes in cancer and cardiovascular risk ratios occur out of sync with changes in animal food intake.

So what is responsible for the Vegetable Group's lower mortality hazard ratios (and the Animal Group's higher ones)?

Here's a clue. Every time the researchers made multivariate adjustments to the data to account for the risk factors they did document (including physical activity, BMI, alcohol consumption, hypertension, and smoking, among other things), the hazard ratio went down for the Animal Group (meaning it got better) and it went up for the Vegetable Group adherents (meaning it got worse). That indicates pretty clearly that the Animal Group adherents had more proclivity to disease right from the get go, regardless of meat consumption, and the Vegetable Group adherents may have been more health-aware than most folks. (To see what I'm talking about, look at the mortality tables under the "10″ column, and compare the "Age- and energy-adjusted HR" with the "Multivariate-adjusted HR" for each group.)

In other words, it looks like what this study really measured was a Standard American Diet group (aka highest Animal Group decile) and a slightly-less Standard American Diet group (aka highest Vegetable Group decile). Both ate sucky diets, but the latter had slightly less suckage. You can bet the farm that neither was anything close to "low carb." And if you have two farms, you can bet the other one that neither diet group was anything near plant-based, so I'm not sure the vegan crowd has much to gloat about here.

The End.