Mice and breast cancer

Laura and Elizabeth (thanks for full text) both forwarded links to this study.

Low carb diets, in the correct mouse model, delay onset and slow progression of breast cancer.

It says the sorts of things you would expect it to say and, if you really feel this highly artificial mouse model has relevance to the sorts of breast cancer humans might develop, it certainly suggests that a low carbohydrate diet might have some benefits. But the paper itself is awful.

Two giggles did come out of it. First was the use of high percentage of casein as the sole protein source. Now somewhere, sometime, there was a vegan nut who screamed that casein was carcinogenic. China? China Syndrome? China Study? T. Colon Campbell???? Shrug. These has-been vegans get everywhere.

The second is the extreme fat phobia of the authors. I know these people have to make a crust and funding is not what it used to be and fat bashing is always helpful but there eventually comes a point when people really believe that fat causes cancer. Even highly saturated milk fat.

You can just imagine that cows evolved casein and palmitic acid to kill their calves. Or humans are not mammals in the same way as cows are, human breasts having evolved to sell newspapers rather than to feed offspring. Human babies should be fed sucrose water with a little soya bean oil added of course. It's a strange world.

I have reached the point where I no longer give any credence to high fat diet studies where 30% of the calories are coming from sucrose or the pellets are stained red to signify Crisco. Not so the current authors.

Ultimately, while sucrose and trans fats are excellent substances to study when looking at the effects of pushing the profitability of the food industry to its absolute maximum, they have nothing to do with a high fat diet based on Food.

Reading through the full text there are so many failures of perception and basic biochemistry that it might be worth a post in the end, but here's a typical blooper. Not only do we have Gourmand rats, we also have mice who need false teeth!

First we have to have another black box warning

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Untested ad hoc hypotheses can make you look very stupid.

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Here we go:

"Although mice on 8% CHO diet had slower growing tumors, they lost weight, weighing, on average, 20% less than mice on 5058 diet (Fig. 1D). This was consistent with the mice eating less than the 5058 group (data not shown), likely because the 8% CHO pellets were significantly harder to chew."

Executive summary: We're idiots.

Extended translation:

Diet 5058 is standard breeding colony crap-in-a-bag with 55% of calories from starch. It appears to be mildly obesogenic compared to 8% of calories from starch... That MUST be because the lower carb diet is too hard to chew. We couldn't be arsed to have a control group offered a harder diet with 55% carbs because we're idiots, as are our scrutineers.

GCBC anyone?

Oh, and another giggle: 5058 is described, COMPLETELY incorrectly, as a "Western Diet". It's a starch based, sucrose free, 20% fat, mostly PUFA, trans free diet, remarkably similar to Barnard's idiotic vegan diet for the progression of diabetes in humans. It's standard mouse chow.


Where do funding bodies find these people to throw their money at?

Eeeh, yer has ter larph.

Peter