The closest I came to practicing medicine in my career as a medical reporter was during countless lunches with colleagues in the AP cafeteria, an activity we used to refer to delicately as “tying on the feed bag.” Newspaper people are classy; I’m pretty sure that’s well known.
I covered a lot of stories on diet and nutrition, and my lunch pals were all over me about what they should or shouldn’t be eating. I gave them the best unlicensed medical advice I could muster. It was a good reality check–I got a preview of the reactions that readers might have when the stories went out on the wire.
The point is that these stories can be tricky. A study this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine is a good example.
According to a release from the AMA, which publishes the journal, “a low-calorie, low-fat diet appears more beneficial to dieters’ mood than a low-carbohydrate plan with the same number of calories.” The reasons were unclear.
Simeon Bennett of Bloomberg.com writes, “Dieters eating food high in carbohydrates and low on fat improved their mood longer than those on a low-carb, high-fat regime similar to the Atkins diet, researchers say.”
It’s not bad, if a little clumsy: Dieters didn’t improve their mood; it was the diet that did it. And Bennett might have done better to leave Atkins out of it. A lot of people already love or hate that diet, and we could do without the emotional baggage. This was low-fat versus low-carb; Atkins wasn’t involved.
The headline, for which we won’t blame Bennett, is a little less successful: “Low-Fat Diet Makes People Less Angry Than Low-Carb, Study Says.” The diet was associated with multiple mood changes, not simply anger. And the headline sounds more conclusive than the study did.
Miranda Hitti of WebMD backs into the story: “If you’re looking to lose extra pounds and weighing the options of a low-fat diet vs. a low-carbohydrate diet, you might want to consider the moody findings of a new diet study,” she writes. In the second graf, she notes that the mood of both groups improved briefly. And in the third graf she says that improvement didn’t last in the low-carb group. It almost becomes a story about mood improvements fading in the low-carb group, rather than a story about mood improvements persisting in the low-fat group.
She wasn’t the only one to bury the lede. Note the following:
Amanda Gardner of HealthDay: “Both a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet such as the popular Atkins program and a low-fat, high-carb diet appear to help people lose pounds over the course of a year.”
Jeannine Stein of the Los Angeles Times Booster Shots blog: “The high-protein versus high-carb diet debate continues with the release of a new study that looked at something usually left out of the weight loss equation: mood.”
John Fauber of the Health and Science Today blog on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website did it nicely, short and sweet: “You can lose a lot of weight on either a low-carb or low-fat diet, but after a year your mood is likely to be better on the low-fat regimen, a study found.”
– Paul Raeburn
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