Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Humorous Study Disection

While I doubt that disecting studies will ever become a truly mass media event, this one's pretty funny for a geek like me.  Hyper Lipid's hyper-dissection of this study does a nice job of showing how a "study" and its "conclusions" are supposed to be picked over and picked apart.  Along the way, we can learn a little bit about the finer points of the study of fat metabolism and in particular its relationship to diabetes. 
BLUF:  Don't eat trans-fats unless you like being sick, and don't feed it to mice unless you want to confound your test results.

Also, a nice clarification in the post - what is the difference between partially hydrogenated and hydrogenated?

Cited Study Text:
The present study used hydrogenated corn oil for dietary fat sources since it has less harmful effect on diabetes than lard, even though it contained trans fat.27 
Hyper Lipid Translation: This study did not use hydrogenated corn oil.  It used PARTIALLY hydrogenated corn oil, full hydrogenation would eliminate all trans fats.  Bollocks statement number two is that trans fats have a less harmful effect on diabetes than lard.

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