Food Choices and Coronary Heart Disease

Barry Groves published today a note on his blog about this new study. The most interesting are certain heretical conclusions such as, quote:

Daily intake of fruit and vegetables was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease when combined with a high dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 0.39, 95% CI 0.21-0.73), but not when combined with a low dairy fat consumption (odds ratio 1.70, 95% CI 0.97-2.98).

It is noticeable that the odds ratios are highly significant, by a large factor, namely 61% lower risk for high fat and 70% higher for low fat consumption! By high/low fat the authors meant this:

Low consumption of dairy fat was defined as milk with 1.5 percent fat or less, no butter and seldom or never intake of cream. All others were denoted high consumption of dairy fat.

However, the real harbinger of low fat diet doom is table 4 (click on the picture to magnify):



I strongly suggest to print it out and stick it on a fridge!

Finally, the following heretical, no - an outright subversive paragraph found its way into the end section. Please understand that I am in a state of shock [aaaah] - you are looking at the paper published in the mainstream peer-reviewd scientific journal. Quote:

In the prospective population-based Malmö Diet and Cancer Study, total fat and saturated fat were not associated with cardiovascular events [14]. Evidence support harmful effects of trans-fatty acids on coronary heart disease, but there is insufficient evidence of associations between saturated fat and heart disease [3]. We lack a clear understanding of the complex effects on health of fats in relation to other components in dairy products [32,33]. A recent review and meta-analysis of 15 cohort studies of vascular disease and milk and dairy consumption found lower relative risks of stroke and/or heart disease in subjects with a high milk and dairy consumption relative to the risk in subjects with low consumption [34].