Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Bring out the brownie

Rich chocolate brownie slightly heated, hot fudge on top and French vanilla icecream on the side. The Whole Foods brownie is bloody expensive btw, try the Trader Joe's one, its awesome and affordable and it comes in packets of four.

Low fat food does not cut health risks, says the front page of the Times.

2 comments:

Falstaff said...

Ya, I had the same reaction. Then I read the actual papers:

a) This is a trial with women in the age-group 50 - 79. So if I can get to the point where I'm 50 and post-menopausal then I will gorge on brownies for all they're worth

b) For all the talk about low-fat diet, there's basically no decrease in the cholesterol levels of the intervention and comparison groups - both groups see a drop in cholesterol and the difference is a mere 1%, so it's not surprising that they don't get higher risks of heart disease.

c) If you look carefully at the tables, you see a dramatic increase within each of the groups in risk of heart disease by BMI. People with BMI < 25 had an annualised % of cases that was about one-third that of those who were truly obese

d) The people in their comparison group aren't exactly pigging it out either. Average fat intake / day is 76 g at the start of the study, with a total energy intake of about 1800 KCal.

e) Finally, I don't know if ethnicity is a major factor, but something like 2% of their sample is Asian - so it's questionable whether it's generalisable to other ethnic groups

Sigh. Okay. Back to salads.

Veena said...

So in another 25 years, if my BMI < 25 and my avg fat intake is < 76 g, then maybe I can go back to hogging brownies? Thank you for spoiling my perfect day.