Women's Health Initiative: A Really Bad Study

Have you heard the news? What you eat just doesn't matter!

The big health "news" of 2006 is that apparently, eating a low-fat diet doesn't protect women against breast cancer or heart disease. This study is touted as being "conclusive" - that is, a few fearless researchers with no hidden agenda have overturned a bunch of health "superstitions" by proving scientifically that - essentially - we're gonna get sick and fat no matter what, so we might as well stop trying to improve our diets.

Fortunately, the truth is much more hopeful than that.

The women's health initiative study on the relationship between diet and disease, as big and long-lasting and comprehensive as it was, is actually one of the least significant health studies ever conducted, and certainly provides less useful information per dollar spent - over one billion dollars over 12 years - than perhaps any other study in the history of studies.

Actually, a grad student at Temple University in the early 1990s published a PhD dissertation comparing foul shot percentages with orange or blue basketball nets. It may have provided slightly more trivial results, but at least it took only the better part of an afternoon and cost under 20 bucks.

Here's the problem with the low fat study: it compared two groups of older women - one on the standard American Diet, and the other on the standard American Diet with skinless chicken and skim milk.

Listen carefully to what I'm saying - there was no real difference between the two groups.

I'm just glad the tobacco companies were never clever enough to come up with studies like this. They would have compared 7-pack a day smokers to 7 and a half-pack a day smokers and found roughly the same amount of lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema, and would have declared that smoking therefore does not cause these diseases.

The Women's Health Initiative's "low-fat diet" consisted of 29% fat, compared to the control group's 37% fat. A whopping 8% difference. Woo-hoo!

The two groups consumed the same number of calories. And the "low fat" group had - are you sitting down? - on average, just one more serving per day of a fruit or vegetable.

There are many reasons to dismiss this dangerous and ill-conceived study as completely irrelevant to human health. But the main one to remember is that it didn't present a real difference.

Both groups ate mostly ultra-processed foods and animal products, with few fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains.

If you want to virtually eliminate your risk of heart disease or cancer, you can. If you want to set up your kids for vital and healthy lives, you can. Please don't let bad science - no matter how well-funded - shake your confidence. Your kids are counting on you.

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