Does the High Fat Diet Cause Diabetes? No, But The Onslaught of Bad Research Is Making Me Burn Out.

I've received a torrent of mail about the study recently published in NATURE which claims that eating a "high fat diet" damages beta cells and causes diabetes.

You can read a summary here:

Science Daily: How a High Fat Diet Causes Diabetes

I don't have access to the full article, but I have read (and commented on) dozens of other articles that purport to show that "high fat diets" cause diabetes. And, I have also written at length about the problem of confusing rodent diabetes with human diabetes. Folks, wake up. This was a rodent study!

In every case, the "high fat diet" used in rodent studies is the rodent equivalent of eating a burger with fries and a milkshake. I.e. it's a diet very high in fats, but also very high in carbohydrates--and often that carbohydrate comes in the form of high fructose corn syrup.

In addition, as I've mentioned dozens of times before, rodent metabolisms are very different from human metabolisms because rodents are adapted to eat a very different kind of diet. Rodent diabetes is not human diabetes. "Cures" for diabetic rodents almost never work in humans. Drugs that are safe in rodents harm people.

There is very little research looking into human/rodent differences because rodent research has become a huge specialty in medical research and eliminating reliance on rodent studies would put a lot of very highly paid medical research lab heads out of work. Since it is precisely these highly paid heads of rodent labs who make up the committees who decide who gets research funding, the system is self-perpetuating. Rodent research, no matter how flawed and irrelevant breeds more rodent research.

But that rodent research is not only flawed, it's dangerous. A very rare--and very relevant--study about rodent-human differences was published recently (with almost no mention in the press) and it underlines what I'm talking about.

It found that, in the words of the chief researcher, "...the difference in gene expression between the mouse and the human is very very large." And concluded that the potassium channels acted upon by sulfonylurea drugs are found in completely different places in rodent hearts than they are in human hearts, which means that a drug that is safe for rodents would cause "fatal arrhythmias" in humans. (Which they do. Glipizide, glibenclamide, etc. raise the risk of dying of heart disease over time.)

Science Daily: Human Hearts Respond Differently Than Mouse Hearts to Two Cardiovascular Drugs.

But I can post as much here as I want about flawed studies. It doesn't help. Because the people who read these posts on my blog about misleading research are the people who are already aware of why the research is flawed. It's a classic case of "preaching to the converted."

Analysis of my blog's stats makes it clear that the people who read these kinds of articles are a very small minority of those who read this blog. Almost all the traffic to this blog goes to articles that discuss commonly prescribed drugs and tests. They answer common questions people have who are newly diagnosed. Few who visit this site to find answers to that kind of question read anything but a single post. In short, by now it's clear that the many hours I spend tracking down the details that might offer counterarguments to misleading medical headline news is wasted.

So what it comes down to is this. I can't single-handedly, in my spare time, and for free, counteract the toxic effects an entire medical research establishment funded by multi-billionaire predatory drug companies and backed by armies of doctors who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to, supposedly, take care of people with diabetes.

Over the last six years I've posted dozens of posts just like this one, many much more detailed, but all pointing out basic flaws and citing other studies that make it very clear that eating carbohydrates is what raises blood sugars, not fats. And that high blood sugars are what cause diabetic complications in humans, not eating fats. I've put an average of 3 hours into each post. Sometimes more. I've answered hundreds of comments and emails from people who read the blog posts and want to know more.

Meanwhile, the misinformation that shapes diabetes treatment gets louder and louder. So it's time for some of the rest of you to get active. If you want things to change, you are going to have to write letters to newspapers and journals, confront doctors, call your TV station, and band together with other people with diabetes to change the way that people with diabetes are treated. If you don't do this, nothing will change, no matter how elegantly I dissect research publications.

There's enough material on this blog by now that a person who wanted to understand any of these new studies could easily apply what has already been explained and do their own analysis. There's plenty you could print out and show your doctor if you took the time.

As far as what I'm going to do it's this. I am done wasting my very limited time reading and commenting on flawed studies. From now on, the only studies I'm going to put time into describing are those that come up with new information that can actually help people with diabetes improve their health.

Such studies are very rare. Please do not email me links to the studies that appear each week "proving" stupid stuff that any reader of this blog and the main Blood Sugar 101 Website knows is bullshit.

Gloria Steinem said something brilliant, reported last week, which sums up exactly how I feel right now.

She said, "The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded on line -- of sending an email or twitter and confusing that with action -- while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on."

People with diabetes need to stop reading things that they agree with and start confronting those centers of power if they want anything to change. Reading elegant articles here might make you feel good, but to change anything you will have to take action. I've already given you hundreds of thousands of words worth of ammunition. Now use it.