Current Posts – 7 July 2014

Want to lose weight with a calorie controlled diet? Don’t. That’s the strong advice of nutritionist and author Zoe Harcombe. To her the most basic dieting equation, eating fewer calories than you burn equals weight loss, made no sense. It sounds like common sense but top nutritional bodies couldn’t show her any evidence for it. Despite this failure, they still continue to recommend it to patients. Eminence based medicine strikes again.

No apologies for writing about statins – again. These are the biggest selling drugs of all time and we still don’t know for certain if, for healthy people, they are worth taking. Now a group of independent statin experts and senior doctors have published an open letter stating there should be no increase in prescribing because commercial interests have rendered existing data unreliable. The statin saga represents a serious failure of evidence based medicine as it is currently organised.

We’ve written a lot about statins because it affects so many people and there seems a serious gaps in the evidence that it is as safe and effective as the medical mainstream claims. Last week one of statins’ most eminent and aggressive supporters rode into battle, claiming that errors in articles about statins that claimed the side effects were higher than he believed, were badly flawed, dangerous and should be withdrawn. We don’t think this is how science should be done.