Though I’m passionate about being Uppity Fit, I read very few fitness or health blogs or mags. Why? Because they’re largely a waste of time.
There’s so little news about fitness, the industry media has to invent it in order to have something to publish. Even mainstream journalists will sensationalize or twist information about fitness because they need copy that will sell papers.
It’s rare for fitness “personalities” to talk about this, afraid as they are of getting bad press in retaliation. But a few righteous Ribs do, like Tom Venuto, which is why I read his blog. 1
Venuto, the hottie there on the right, writes frequently about the importance of analyzing critically the info on health rather than just believing everything you read.
His latest post is about the media’s ridiculous reporting on a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine titled, “Weight Loss With a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat Diet.”
Venuto points out how totally wrong most journalists got this study. Most of them said – in big, splashy headlines – that it proves that low-carb diets like Fatkins are superior to low fat and “Mediterranean”-style diets for weight loss.
Wrong! But thanks for playing.
The study actually shows that none of the diets worked very well. The weight loss was minimal: 6 to 10 pounds in 2 years.2
In addition, this study proves nothing because the diet data the researchers used was all based on participant reports. Food diaries are hardly scientifically controlled. (Like memory, estimating one’s food intake is notoriously error-prone.)
There’s lotsa other things the journalists got wrong about the study, but you get the idea. As Venuto says:
Please, please, please learn how to find and read primary research and take the news media stories with a grain of salt. If you want to know who died, what burned down or what hurricane is coming, tune in to the news – they do a GREAT job at that. If you want to know how to lose weight or improve your health, look up the original research papers instead of taking second hand information at face value.
Amen and pass the sourdough.3
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, journalism
- So does Mistress Krista of stumptuous.com. Check her out, too. [↩]
- And who knows how much of that was actually fat and not muscle. [↩]
- Interestingly, the study reported that the rate of adherence was the poorest in the low-carb group, proving that man cannot live on bacon grease alone, at least for very long, no matter how good the idea sounds at the time. [↩]
