Do We Really Know What Those Studies Mean?

Seriously, the next time someone tells us that red meat isn’t healthy for us I think we may just faint right in front of them.

 

The nature of the media is such that the headlines are “click bait” designed to get the most traffic.

 

Almost every day someone sends us something that tells us meat is bad or good … butter is bad or good … eggs are bad or good.

 

The hands down best article we’ve ever come across that outlines how we should all view research is Gary Taubes’ 2007 masterpiece, Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?

 

Here’s a small portion:

 

Once upon a time, women took estrogen only to relieve the hot flashes, sweating, vaginal dryness and the other discomforting symptoms ofmenopause. In the late 1960s, thanks in part to the efforts of Robert Wilson, a Brooklyn gynecologist, and his 1966 best seller, “Feminine Forever,” this began to change, and estrogen therapy evolved into a long-term remedy for the chronic ills of aging. Menopause, Wilson argued, was not a natural age-related condition; it was an illness, akin to diabetes or kidney failure, and one that could be treated by taking estrogen to replace the hormones that a woman’s ovaries secreted in ever diminishing amounts. With this argument estrogen evolved into hormone-replacement therapy, or H.R.T., as it came to be called, and became one of the most popular prescription drug treatments in America.

By the mid-1990s, the American Heart Association, the American College of Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists had all concluded that the beneficial effects of H.R.T. were sufficiently well established that it could be recommended to older women as a means of warding off heart disease and osteoporosis. By 2001, 15 million women were filling H.R.T. prescriptions annually; perhaps 5 million were older women, taking the drug solely with the expectation that it would allow them to lead a longer and healthier life. A year later, the tide would turn. In the summer of 2002, estrogen therapy was exposed as a hazard to health rather than a benefit, and its story became what Jerry Avorn, a Harvard epidemiologist, has called the “estrogen debacle” and a “case study waiting to be written” on the elusive search for truth in medicine.

 

We highly recommend taking the time to read it in its entirety.

 

Print if off if you have to, it’s that good.