Does Higher Saturated Fat Intake Worsen Blood Flow? Think Again!

Filed under: In The News,Study — @ April 3, 2009

He’s baaaaaaaack! Dr. Michael Miller gets his fat-hating study published

Another day, another so-called published “study” slamming the Atkins diet. Some things just never change. And yet some things seem to stay the same, too.

Details about the latest anti-low-carb research to come down the pipeline are documented in this new study published this week and my fellow low-carb blogging friend Laura Dolson from About.com’s Low-Carb Diets site writes an excellent recap of the study details. I even blogged about it when the study was first presented publicly in 2007.

Here are the basic details of the study:

Lead researcher Dr. Michael Miller from the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical Center received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to observe cholesterol and heart health risk factors when dieters reached their weight loss goals and decide to stay on their same diet. One would think this kind of an in-depth study would involve at least several hundred overweight participants on a variety of dietary plans to shed the pounds over at least a one-year period of time, right? Nope.

The study included 18 HEALTHY and NORMAL WEIGHT people who each went on one of three diet plans for four weeks at a time:

ATKINS–50% fat
SOUTH BEACH–30% fat
ORNISH–10% fat

The study participants engaged in all three diets with a four-week period between the diets from January to December 2006. Cholesterol levels were checked at the beginning of each new four-week period prior to starting on a new diet and the researcher evaluated other heart health risk factors as well. Additionally, since the study participants were on their own with the foods they ate, a 3-day food record journal was also looked at at the end of each four-week period. Blood vessel function was also checked by measuring the blood vessel dilation in the arm.

Dr. Miller stated that the higher the saturated fat is in the diet, the lower the blood vessel dilation is, which regulates the flow of blood in the body. Wagging his finger of blame at the worst culprit in his opinion, he scorned the diet that contained the most saturated fat.

“The diet that performed the worst was the Atkins diet,” Miller said.

Click here to learn more about Dr. Miller’s “study” and why his bias against the Atkins low-carb diet shines through loud and clear.