The American Diabetes Association is at it Again

I’m not a big fan of the American Diabetes Association (ADA). The leading founding sponsors of the organization are as follows:

• Eli Lilly - Manufacturer for Mounjaro and Trulicity for type 2 diabetes, Jardiance (empagliflozin), and various types of insulin, such as Humalog and Humulin, along with the Lyumjev insulin pen and the Tempo diabetes management platform.

• Novo Nordisk - The largest manufacturer of the insulin in the world

• Sanofi - Manufactures the long-acting insulin Lantus (insulin glargine), the insulin aspart product, the GLP-1 receptor agonist Soliqua, and the type 1 diabetes immunotherapy Tzield.

The ADA just came out with two studies that are jussssttt a little suspect. The first study’s headline is:

“Saturated fat is more metabolically harmful for the human liver than unsaturated fat and simple sugars.”

They had 38 obese (BMI over 30) subjects in the study. So right away you can probably bet they aren’t on low carb diets. Then they divided the subjects into 3 groups. Each group was ‘overfed’ 1000 kcal/day of either:

1. Saturated fat - 30g of coconut oil, 40g of butter and 100g of 40% fat blue cheese

2. Unsaturated fat - 36g olive oil, 26g pesto, 54g pecan nuts, and 20g butter

3. Simple sugars - 2.8 dL orange juice, 4.3 dL sugar-sweetened beverage, and 200 g candy

All of the groups received at least a quarter of their calories from carbohydrates. And they did the overfeeding for 3 weeks. So 38 people who already are eating garbage are fed more.

And then we can extrapolate this to everyone?

Oh and this study is saying candy is better than saturated fat? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

The other study has this headline:

“Low-Carbohydrate Diets of Varying Macronutrient Quality and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Three U.S. Prospective Cohort Studies”

This one looks more impressive in that they tracked 199,000+ individuals. The trouble is they were reviewing data from the ‘Nurses Health Study’, the ‘Nurses Health Study II’ and the ‘Health Professionals Follow Up Study’.

These are all epidemiological studies. That means they had the participants fill out questionnaires about what they ate.

In the Health Professionals study they filled out questionnaires about what they ate once every two years! How accurate do you think those answers were? Even the Nurses Studies had questionnaires every 6 months.

Pretty much all of the participants in the studies were eating standard American diets. None of the participants were eating truly low carb diets (50g of carbs or less). For example the Nurses Health Study participants were eating:

“diets characterized by high intake of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and plant-based oils, with lower intake of red and processed meats, sweets, and sugar-sweetened beverages.”

These studies seem to go against everything most of us see on a daily basis. And don’t seem to be very scientific at all.

It’s really sad how hard it’s becoming to find anyone to trust these days. One group you can trust, in my opinion, is the American Diabetes Society. They are run by some great doctors who really believe in finding the right diets and treatments for people - not the most profitable.