Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

Headlines were abuzz this week, reporting that a new review of randomized controlled trials at the time of the low-fat guidelines didn't support their institution. Time , Business Insider , and The Verge all covered the topic with sensationalist headlines (e.g. 'We should never have told people to stop eating fat' #weneverdid). I won't spend every part of this blog picking apart the entire meta-analysis; you can read it over at the open access journal, BMJ Open Heart (1) -- (note, for myself, i'm adding an extra level of skepticism for anything that gets published in this journal). I'm also not going to defend low-fat diets either, but rather, use this meta-analysis to point out some critical shortcomings in nutritional sciences research, and note that we should be wary of meta-analyses when it comes to diet trials. First off, let's discuss randomized controlled trials (RCTs). They are considered the gold standard in biomedical research; in the hierarc...

I saw earlier today that  Steven Novella, MD, over at Neurlogica blog  covered some controversy surrounding Golden Rice and it reminded me I had some thoughts to throw down about the GR issue. Dr Novella's post was in response to some of the claims made in a comment written on his post about a recent Nature Biotechnology paper on crop biofortification .  This is an area I've seen a lot of commentary on, no doubt because Golden Rice is a transgenic crop. Dr Novella makes some good commentary in his post and I suggest reading it ( here ) before the rest of this post - it will contain some additional thoughts to Dr Novella's. Dr Novella did a great job fielding the opposition to Golden Rice, which is something I've always found rather odd - I guess if you're vehemently opposed to a technology that represents a diverse array of methods (there's not one way to genetically engineer a plant) and innumerable potential outcomes (plants can be engineered for any number ...

A recent study published in the open-access journal, African Journal of Biotechnology, entitled " Addressing the issue of horizontal gene transfer from a diet containing genetically modified components into rat tissues " has been making the rounds on social media and throughout the anti-GMO community. Before we break down the study, it's important to note that it follows up on a 2013 study by Spisak, et al, in PloS One (1), that caused some controversy, because it's results suggested that whole plant genes crosse from the digestive tract into the human blood stream. These findings were immediately jumped upon by the typical anti- GMO media (Natural News, Collective Evolution, etc etc  here ,  here ,  here ,  here ) where the story incited fear that trans-genes in plants could be floating around in our blood stream. The actual study wasn't specific to GMOs; actually, GMOs are only briefly mentioned. The findings were controversial because the idea that whole g...

I've seen a meme shared on social media multiple times this week, asserting that our foods contain paint thinners in the form of Trisodium Phosphate (TSP). The image below was shared on a FaceBook page called "Organic Health" with the caption "It's right in our faces... Just mocking us. Can you believe there is paint thinner in cereal?"   : from Organic Health, link here The meme links to an article over at naturalcuresnotmedicine ( here ). The article contains very little scientific material and quite obviously is written to scare people out of buying foods with TSP, not present an objective viewpoint on it. The article states that TSP is something that developers and construction workers should be familiar with, not people buying food (a pretty pointless comparison). The authors of the natural cures article go so far to even say that inorganic phosphate can be detrimental to our health: there is no citation for this claim, which is a rather ludicrou...

A recent study looking at saturated fat intake in the context of a low-carbohydrate diet came out in PLoSOne the other day (1), and the headlines are covering the topic in their typical misleading fashion - see medicalnewstoday's article here titled "Rise of Saturated Fat in Diet does not Raise Fats in Blood". Even Greg Miller, PhD tweeted the study to me saying: At face value, seeing that headline and Greg's comment, I would think...hmm okay, researchers got together, set up a tracer study using some kind of labeled fatty acids in individuals consuming typical diets and showed that lipid fractions in the blood weren't enriched in these labeled fats, in any individual, obese or not, and that there was some functional outcome. Having read the study, I can tell you that's not even close to what was done - so let's investigate further: The study was entitled "Effects of Step-Wise Increases in Dietary Carbohydrate on Circulating Saturated Fatty Ac...

Fats are all the rage lately, as people who become interested in nutrition start to realize that the field's methods are far from perfect and leave the science pretty soft . I find the conversation to be a bit nauseating at times, as we try to isolate one nutrient while ignoring the whole food complex, and the food's place in the context of the diet**. Lately, the conversation seems to be about butter - is butter back? Bittman proudly declared it so . Time Magazine had a cover with the headline "Eat Butter". Harvard School of Public Health responded with an article, " Is Butter Really Back?" . What's the deal - is the nutritional sciences community really that split on whether you should be using butter or oil? My take on the issue is much more simplistic than opinions on fatty acid profiles that can't be backed up by the current data (unless someone can find me some data where humans replaced only palmitic acid with only linoleic acid and saw be...

I've been meaning to start a series on food additives and why they're in foods. Often, food ingredients list a lot of words that people don't understand and.or know their purpose/safety - despite what one might hear, not being able to pronounce a word on a food label is not a reason to not consume that food. Words on the food label like Pantothenic Acid and Pyridoxine might sound frightening, but they're actually just vitamins B5 and B6. There's unfortunately much fearmongering that surrounds food additives that often strays far from science or even precautionary principles, so I figured i'd do a little mini-series on the topic. What better way to segue into this  than with the recent talk of propylene glycol  in Fireball, a popular cinnamon flavored whiskey.The story was reported on here . Fireball was recalled in Europe, after an American shipment was sent overseas. The amount of propylene glycol allowed in American Fireball is different than Europe, so it w...