Malingering’s World

Sigh. I know I can’t write about this on my gym website or the Crossfit website because I’ve learned that within the Crossfit community, regardless of what you think, you don’t question the dogma. So I’ll just talk to myself here to alleviate the pain. Forgive me for I have sinned.

I found a free copy of the Crossfit journal on diet and metabolism, and I read it a few times and started to get upset and frustrated that they charge people for this and even worse, that people pay for it and believe everything it says or pass it around saying things like “great article!” and I have to bite my tongue and walk away.

The first section entitled “food” can be summed up as follows: “Nanny nanny nanny, we were right, you were wrong, fat is fine, carbs are bad, we are great.” Then they go onto make a bunch of presumptively brash statements like, “We have the science and we showed it proudly. No one would read it” and “the science supporting our position, while being produced at an increasing rate, was always there and is not responsible for the dramatic change over the past two years.” Um, okay. How about you summarize and reference that “science” because I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about and you can’t call it science if you can’t even tell me what it is.

Within this whimpery whiny presentation, they manage to say “the cry for peer-reviewed evidence is almost always a smoke screen. The guys who write it read it - the rest pretend.” What sort of argument is that (if I even dignify it by calling it an argument)? And secondly, while most people may not scour Pubmed the way I do, peer reviewed articles are summarized on a daily basis on msnbc, the health section of the Times, various fitness magazines and journals, etc. Most people do read, and have opinions, but for some reason it seems we count on them not asking questions or being critical of what we write. And if we are critical, then we get called a smart ass or “too negative” rather than “independent thinking” or “interested in learning more.”

They then go on to list “responsible” diet books and authors. Their criteria for “responsible” is merely that the theories presented in the books support the Crossfit Zone/low carb dogma. There is no requirement that these authors use valid “science,” and this list was not reviewed by an objective party. I’m not sure what’s responsible about that. Kickbacks?

Next there’s a nice chart about “the deadly quartet” and hyperinsulinemia and a quote “there are two serious problems with medical science today: first that correlation and causation are tragically confused by many researchers and second, that there is low regard and little interest among academics with the often highly successful protocols employed by clinicians.” (Huh?) They also state that Atkins had “proven in thousands if not millions of persons who’d followed his book” that “hyperinsulinism was the cause of heart disease risk factors.” Note that they said cause, not correlate. It all sounds really important and smart until you look at the actual data and find that for the most part the decrease in hyperinsulinemia is merely correlated with low carb diets (and weight loss) and the causation studies are less impressive. For example, two JAMA articles show that over the course of a year, insulin levels drop both with low carb diets (Atkins and Zone) and high carb diets (Ornish and LEARN), and the drop correlated most closely with weight loss, not carb intake. So where’s the causation there?

The amount of weight loss predicted the amount of improvement in several cardiac risk factors . For each diet, weight loss was significantly associated with changes in total/HDL cholesterol ratio (r = –0.36), C-reactive protein (r = –0.37), and insulin levels (r = –0.39), regardless of diet type (P = .48, P = .57, P = .31, respectively, for difference between diets). No diet significantly worsened any cardiac risk factor in association with weight loss or dietary adherence at 1 year. ( JAMA, 2005; 293: 43-53)

Insulin and glucose measurements were obtained from the same aforementioned 84% of the total sample for lipids. Neither the overall trajectory (ie, across all time points) nor the 12-month differences were significantly different among groups for either fasting insulin or fasting glucose concentrations. (JAMA. 2007;297:969-977)

Well there’s my “peer-reviewed science” and I’m posting it not as a “smokescreen” but as empirical data.

Look, there is no doubt that low carb diets work. They do. So do high carb diets. And so does weight watchers. And Jenny Craig. And calorie limitation. And exercise. And all of these other things that have been talked about forever and ever. There’s no reason to start whining about it and call it a “battle for the hearts and minds of the public” (Crossfit Journal Issue 15, page 1) and then start attacking “academics” and “doctors, nutritionists, trainers and family” who ask for evidence (when you don’t even really have it).

Let’s just all hold hands and sing kumbaya and accept that there are a whole lot of theories out there and no one is really sure what’s the best way to do things and not turn this into an all out war over good vs. evil. It’s really not. Some people are out to make a lot of money by spreading their dogma and discounting everyone else. And some people (like me) really just want to be healthy for now.

 Viewed 8001 times by 1578 viewers