I have lots of biases in the area the paper is talking about. I’ve acquired the actual paper and on first pass they don’t define what low carb means… really, they don’t, anywhere… including the supplemental material. Making best effort inferences on how they make the category cohorts, it seems 40% of energy from carbs is the cutoff. 40% of a 1800 calorie diet is about 200g of carbs per day.
Currently my smells on this paper
- Who : Harvard nutrition, a org with a history of heavy plant based bias
- What they said : PBF beats ABF in a 200g “low carb” diet using intermediate health metrics
- On the basis of what : Epidemiology, on food frequency questionaries, using major assume corrective factors
- In what context : 200g/day carb diet, not controlling for processed foods (so healthy user bias the unprocessed abf group isn’t represented at all)… they explicitly say this paper doesn’t apply to keto “evidence from our study regarding the LCD and LFD patterns cannot be directly generalized to diets with much lower carbohydrates or fats intake, such as the ketogenic diet.”
The bias is really evident in that they defined healthy and unhealthy LCD in terms of animal products… that is presupposing the outcomes in their healthy fat ranking system!
When I have more time I’ll do a full post on this paper after I’ve had time to read it and figure out what the actual data is. I’m gobsmacked a paper on low carb doesn’t even define what % of carbs is low carb explicitly… why make that so indirect and hidden!!!
The good news is harvard is finally acknowledging the tsunami of low carb and keto research in their own way, but they are going to do it kicking and screaming on the pbf hill the entire time… but progress is progress.
They are trying really hard to do something
It’s weird, when the keto and carnivore papers get published they are always open access… but this paper… closed… and doesn’t define their categories… it’s curious. If i wasn’t a charitable man I make think that was intentional.