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Wholegrains give you cancer.....

I bet this study will not get much attention.  If it was finding that wholegrains prevent cancer it would be all over the place but that is not what they found.  The results:

Dietary GI, GL, II, or fiber was not associated with risk of total or subgroups of prostate cancer. We observed a positive association between dietary intake of whole grains and total prostate cancer (HR highest versus lowest quintile 1.13, 95% CI 1.03-1.24), which was attenuated after restriction to PSA-screened participants (HR 1.03, 95% CI 0.91-1.17).

What do they conclude?

These results suggest that long-term exposure to a diet with a high insulin response does not affect prostate cancer incidence.


Er.....but what about the whole grains!?  Doesn't your study suggest that they are associated with increased incidence of cancer?
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Comments

Anonymous said…
It suggests that you can't read. The effect was barely significant, only observed between the top 20% and the lowest 20%, and disappeared after stratification.

The study appeared in a crap journal because the findings are uninteresting and the evidence sparse. Maybe there is a connection, but this study didn't show it.

Please learn to run screaming from epidemiological research unless it's substantiated by validation. I say this as a statistician who works with clinicians and epidemiologists. Clinicians believe nothing, epidemiologists believe everything. I usually side with the clinicians.
November 15, 2010 at 4:41 PM
Chris said…
That was part of the intent of posting this. The newspapers and other media pick up on anything - however tenuous - that supports the conventional wisdom of wholegrain =health. I was just trying to make a point that similarly tenuous research which could be taken to give a contradictory position does not tend to get spotted. i obviously wasn't clear in that.

This blog in the past has often warned of the dangers of epidemiology and that correlation doesn't equal causation etc.

Saying all that, I remain unconvinced that grains are healthy.
November 15, 2010 at 11:27 PM
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