In the Woody Allen movie "Sleeper", he wakes up after having been asleep for 40 or 50 years to discover that scientists have determined that steaks and french fries are actually the healthiest diet one can eat.

We haven't quite reached that point but an article in the news section of OCF,

http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/news/story.asp?newsId=1134

reports that a study of 49,000 women failed to show a difference in the incidence of cancer and/or heart disease related to diet.

The money line:
"In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer heart attack and stroke as those who ate whatever they pleased"

Go figure! - Sheldon

Sheldon, I expect this one will stirr some comment...

I have been eating real butter as long as I can remember and I don't trim all the fat off the prime rib. I really expect that I'll be proven as a pioneer in health food!

One pretty strong (in my mind) critique of that study I heard on NPR yesterday is that the women who were told to eat the low fat diet weren't told anything about the difference between the bad fats (trans fats) and the good fats (the vegetable ones which actually can HELP control heart disease). So when they cut down--they probably cut down on the good as much as the bad--thus hurting themselves as much as they helped themselves and possibly equalling out to no difference between them and the control group.

Nelie

There have been controlled studies linking consumption of saturated fats (esp. animal fats) and incidence of prostate cancer -- also ones showing going to diets high in "good fats" and low in saturated and trans fats reduced PSA levels which is considered a marker for slowing PC growth.

Nelie's point was brought up in a discussion on news last night -- I don't think we have heard the last word on this by any means...

Gail

I believe that while diet can be a contributing factor, it is not a main factor where cancer is concerned. Poor diet COUPLED with something else within that person adds up to cancer. If eating a low fat diet kept cancer away, then we wouldn't need a cure, now would we??
I truly believe that some people are genetically disposed to "getting" cancer. I believe it's why some can smoke two packs a day and avoid cancer and others cannot.

Then toss into the mix the clear, uncontroversial fact that being overweight leads to increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and several types of cancers.

Someone told me that the National Heart Institute were doing a 180 on lo fat diets.
What ya gonna do?
Darrell

If anyone takes a moment to read the actual study, they would realize that this is a very long-term study. When it was originally started, they were not even considering the difference in the types of fats that they would look at. This essentially means that in the patients record keeping questionnaires they cannot differentiate between how much saturated fats (bad for you arteries and definitely causes plaque build up) and mono saturated (definitely good for you) and of course what we now refer to as trans fats, (those that incorporate an extra hydrogen molecule added by a process) which are definitely linked to cancer any person in the study was actually consuming. This is a flaw in the study design that could not have been avoided at the time because we didn't know as much then. So the study is a product of the time in which it was written and we have learned a lot about the types of fats and their impacts on our health, i.e. all fats are not good or bad, and any new study is going to have to look at what types people are consuming. The results of that will definitely be different because we will be considering the types of fats, and we already know much about how those types affect us. This is yet another case of semi-valid data, and the medias interpretation of it without critical thinking involved in that interpretation of reporting the outcome.