Check out this ridiculous article from Med Page Today: Burgers, Fries, and Diet Soda Are Recipe for Metabolic Syndrome.

Now, looking at the title, I can’t say I’d argue with that sentiment. That’s basically a fast food diet and most people on a fast food diet are on a one-way train to ill health. So let’s see what the opening paragraph has to say:

Middle-age adults who regularly eat a double burger, fries, and a diet soda for lunch or dinner increase their risk of incident metabolic syndrome by 25% compared with those who limit red meat to two servings a week.

What? So somehow “a double burger, fries, and a diet soda” was boiled down to “red meat”? That’s media spin and political correctness there.

So from there, they tell us that they used a food frequency questionnaire (strike #2) at three year intervals to divide people into two different eating patterns. They are as follows:

A Western diet contained high amounts of refined grains, processed meat, fried foods, red meat, eggs, and soda with little consumption of low-fat dairy products, fruits, and vegetables.

Prudent eating patterns, by contrast, favored cruciferous vegetables, carotinoid vegetables, fruit, fish and seafood, poultry, and whole grains, along with low-fat dairy products.

Once again, the Western diet pattern is pretty spot on, but can anyone logically look at that list of foods, both those included and those not included, in that eating pattern and say, with perfect candor, “It’s the red meat.” Maybe it’s the eggs (it’s not). Maybe it’s the refined grains and processed meats and fried foods. Hmmm…but I suppose that doesn’t get out the message that red meat is a killer.

Here’s another strike against the food frequency questionnaire:

For example, the questionnaire was “not designed to differentiate whole grain from refined grain items in the food list,” they wrote.

So, ummmm, how exactly did they use this data to determine who was in the Western diet versus Prudent diet if they can’t differentiate between the types of grains people were eating? It sounds like the goal was to villify red meat and it sounds like they pulled it off because the average Joe isn’t going to actually care how the study was conducted.

And how about this?

An unexpected finding was that consuming a prudent diet (i.e. one that had a high concentration of fruits, vegetables, whole grains) and low-fat dairy products did not reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome.

I wonder if that’s because of the lack of fat and protein in that diet or because the questionnaire inadvertently included people that were eating refined grains. The whole thing boils down to patterns. It’s not the red meat. It’s that people that eat red meat are probably less health conscious than those that avoid red meat. We’re constantly told that red meat is bad, so the health conscious are more likely to avoid it. So the less health conscious are eating red meat, French fries, drinking copiously, smoking, not exercising, avoiding fruits and vegetables, and having biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Yet it’s the red meat.


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