Landmark study: Diet and exercise doesn’t help diabetics

Landmark study: Diet and exercise doesn't help diabetics

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Most people don’t realize how that science has verified very little that the doctor tells you.

But if the doctor says it, it must be valid and backed up by science — except that mostly it’s not.

Here’s a tremendous study that shows how little “medical advice” is scientifically proven.

Whenever something that doctors frequently say is studied, it’s usually proven to be wrong.

In this case, it’s diabetes advice.

Advice about diabetes and exercise, diet, and especially medication may all be worthless.

Even if you don’t have diabetes, you should read this carefully.

Diabetes is expected to afflict 27% of men as they get older.

And that means you have a more than 1 in 4 chance of developing it.

So this is an enormous study done cooperatively with 16 clinical centers in the United States.

One group of people got intensive intervention over days, months, and years.

The other group got much less intervention — almost none.

Researchers followed the participants for a 10-year study.

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The scientists expected that the high intervention group would see a much lower rate of sickness and death.

The high intervention group was given intensive counseling.

They received help in increasing exercise and activity levels and diet to control diabetes.

And they received help with diabetes medication.

The intensive lifestyle intervention was aimed at achieving and maintaining weight loss of at least 7% by focusing on reduced caloric intake and increased physical activity.

And just to be very specific:

A calorie goal of 1200 to 1800 kcal per day (with <30% of calories from fat and >15% from protein), the use of meal-replacement products, and at least 175 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week.

Now, you have to realize that these studies are funded by or through drug company’s bottom line.

And they get to make the rules.

For example, the control group for this study was the group not receiving any intervention.

The people who were in the control group were not dying fast enough.

So they change the rules in the middle of the game:

Therefore, hospitalization for angina was added to the primary outcome, and planned follow-up was extended to a maximum of 13.5 years.

So, now instead of 10 years, they were going to go 13 1/2 years.

And they were going to count the incidence of angina as a “primary outcome.”

They hoped that some of the control group would get angina and would show that the intervention group did better.

It’s not that they wanted more people to die — it’s that their way wasn’t working and they had to rig the study.

This may sound a little complicated.

But just remember that they changed the rules to try to make it easier for the intervention group to “win.”

The intervention group was also getting diabetes medications, that’s very important to remember.

The control group is probably getting medications too, but no one paid as much attention.

However, in a few years, they ended the study early because it was evident it was not going to work out well.

On the basis of a futility analysis the study’s primary sponsors instructed the study investigators to terminate the intervention.

In other words, the study wasn’t going their way, so they quit.

But there’s something unusual with this study.

Even though it didn’t show a result that the drug companies wanted, they published it anyway.

It was probably due to the size of the study.

Drug companies bury, censor, or ignore studies when they don’t show a positive result.

This study was just so huge and expensive that they had to publish even though it was a negative result.

As they say in the study, over 10-years,

there was no significant difference between the two groups in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.

So all the advice about losing weight, controlling your diet, and being more active may be nice to do.

It may make you feel better or be healthier.

But as advice on diabetes, it’s not necessarily going to do any good.

But at least in this very large study, it did not help people with diabetes live any longer or healthier.

So why didn’t the people live longer and healthier in the intervention group?

I think that is because both groups got overmedicated.

The study makes reference to increased statin prescriptions for the control group.

I think being in the study made them more conscious of going to the doctor and their prescriptions.

I think both groups were killed by modern medicine.

What this study shows us is that the medical rathole will swallow up anybody — even somebody who is dieting and exercising.

You have to be careful to see if nonmedical interventions can fix or stop a problem getting worse.

Once you go down into the medical rathole, it doesn’t seem to make much difference what you do.

That’s my take on it.

 

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Matt Cook is editor-in-chief of Daily Medical Discoveries. Matt has been a full time health researcher for 26 years. ABC News interviewed Matt on sexual health issues not long ago. Matt is widely quoted on over 1,000,000 websites. He has over 300,000 daily newsletter readers. Daily Medical Discoveries finds hidden, buried or ignored medical studies through the lens of 100 years of proven science. Matt heads up the editorial team of scientists and health researchers. Each discovery is based upon primary studies from peer reviewed science sources following the Daily Medical Discoveries 7 Step Process to ensure accuracy.
Prevalence of and Trends in Diabetes Among Adults in the United States, 1988-2012 
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2434682 

Cardiovascular Effects of Intensive Lifestyle Intervention in Type 2 Diabetes 
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1212914#t=articleMethods 
 

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