Thursday, March 17, 2011

It just gets better and better

(originally posted Feb 27 on another site.)
Well, here I am, interrupting my daily schedule to bring you another blog for the day. I just had to laugh so hard (or cry) that it couldn't wait till tomorrow. 
I had been reading the comments to yesterday's blog about the "bogus" study. 

(See the entry:  http://exceptionallybrash.blogspot.com/2011/03/totally-bogus-study-designed-as-real.html )
Curious, I decided to look up a few of the authors, to see if I could find any other comments about this study from other prominent diet doctors. 
It was just bugging me when that little phrase, "Peer-reviewed journal" kept tumbling over and over in my brain and I kept waking up at night troubled, wondering about who might be a peer of this lead Harvard researcher. (BTW, for those that don't want to go back to the article, it was in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, sounds fancy enough, doesn't it?) 
Whew! 
I started on Frank Sacks, he's the guy the e-mails and comments go to, so he was probably the man in charge. So, I googled him. Interestingly, the "bogus" article didn't show up first, but another article caught my eye. 
It was an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. When I clicked on it, I came up with the journal's conflict of interest policy, written by the prominent editors of the journal. Guess who wrote it? Yea, you guessed it! Frank Sacks! 
So let's recap: He's the editor, he even writes the conflict of interest policy, and then a year or so later, his bogus article gets approved for publication in the same journal. Sounds like there's no conflict of interest here! 
Sounds just like an old-boy club there at Harvard. They all take turns editing, writing and then approving each other's papers. Now if they want to call that HIGH SCHOOL, that's great. The trouble is when they are calling it SCIENCE and you and I are not only paying for it, we're being scolded for not following the recommendations in such a prestigious journal. 
Anyway, I found this really great article about one of Sack's other papers, over at LivinLaVida LowCarb.  Sacks gets skewered, and justifiably so, IMO.  Here's the link:

http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/if-new-research-says-weight-loss-is-all-about-the-calories-then-why-was-the-atkins-diet-omitted-from-the-study/3827

No comments:

Post a Comment