A report that seems to indicate that dietary change may do little to prevent cancer or heart disease has been greeted with criticism and disbelief by the public at large.
The report stems from a federal study called the Women's Health Initiative, and has raised questions about whether the changes in eating habits people are actually capable of can have any significant effect on health.
The study, which looked at the health of nearly 50,000 women over a period of eight years, found that women who reduced their dietary fat had the same rates of colon cancer, breast cancer, and heart disease as those who did not.
However, less than a third of the participants assigned to a low-fat diet actually reached their dietary goal.
Scientists who worked on the study have argued that the study shows that a realistically achievable dietary change does little in terms of health.
Critics have countered that the study offers no evidence of the real results of a genuine change in diet, and have also pointed out that the study failed to examine the effects of different types of fat.
I love science and the scientific method as it frequently allows you to understand foundational truth about life. However, there are some serious potential problems with the scientific method. If your underlying assumptions about an experiment are flawed, the results of the study will be absolutely worthless.
That is precisely what happened with this comprehensive and very expensive government-funded study about the value of food on your health, detailed in the New York Times. They reached the ABSURD conclusion that diet has virtually no influence on your health.
Why?
Because they are 100 percent clueless about a foundational truth of health: Each of us has an individual, biochemical, unique nutritional type, and there is no perfect diet for everyone. The researchers assigned a one-size-fits-all, ineffective diet plan to the study participants, and they naturally found that not everyone was willing to follow it and there was little overall effect.
In fact, there's a good deal of evidence that low-fat diets are not nearly the cure-all they are commonly thought to be; this study could have been another significant addition to the mounting evidence that the healthiest diet for you isn't necessarily low-fat at all.
Instead, the researchers, in part because they completely ignored the fact that fat comes in more than one variety, came to the ridiculous conclusion that no matter how hard you try, you can't change your eating habits all that much, almost as if you were born to be obese.
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Simply put, nutritional typing represents a revolutionary change in how you eat for a lifetime, and not the latest passing fad.