BMJ study on low-carb diets

I don’t normally ask about things like this, but this caught my eye as it’s been circulating the newspapers for the last few days, and has caused a bit of a stir.

Have you seen this earlier? Do you have any thoughts on this? Supposedly it’s one of the biggest feeding studies ever performed, but this is way out of my area of expertise so I thought I’d get your thoughts on this if you have time.

Is there anything interesting about this? Anything in particular to point out?

-Goat

I actually don’t find much interesting about this to be honest. 20 weeks isn’t really long enough to show that a particular diet does better than another at doing anything. Additionally, the authors have found ways to cleverly disguise much of their findings, which is frustrating overall.

I do not find this to be compelling evidence that “low carb diets do ___ better than high carb diets”, nor do I see that this supports a carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity, which has been thoroughly rebutted over and over and over again.

This is a bit outside our area of expertise, but an expert researcher in this field named Kevin Hall (who knows far more about these topics than we do) has published on the methodologic limitations of using doubly-labeled water (DLW) for these types of studies. There was a bit of discussion on the topic here: x.com

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Thanks for the responses doctors.

i’ll try to keep up with what’s being said in the twitter thread!