Newcastle Diet question

MCMLXXIII said:

Pardon me but what do you mean by "oil?"

Click to expand...

A small amount of oil oil, or butter, coconut oil added to veg serving as either a salad dressing, or to stirfry veg a teaspoonful a day is enough.


Edit; details are in the booklet I linked earlier.

Official advice is still fixated on low calorie, which never worked for me or for many others. I think the Newcastle Diet smuggles in low carb by describing it only as "low calorie". And the results from the original trial were reported in a very misleading manner - they kept eliminating everyone who'd dropped out of the trial to inflate the "success" figures.

This is what I posted on the subject in 2024 - I still can't find the thread on the study itself:

There is a much longer thread on the research (and its very low success rate) somewhere on the forum - can't find it at the minute. I notice that the study published in the Lancet again muddies the waters by omitting from the percentage calculations the 45% of the sample who dropped out of the trial part way through and only reports "success" against the people completing it. So - out of 1740 who started, 945 completed the programme and, of these, 145 had two HbA1c measures of less than 48. That's just over 8% of the starting group.

MCMLXXIII said:

That's scandalous! They fudged the figures!?

Click to expand...

Not exactly fudged, although it is a very clear example of a calculated use of "survivor bias". However - the corruption of proper science in recent years has led to a lot of papers and entire journals being withdrawn. We are indebted to a forum member called Oldvatr, no longer with us, who was good at dismantling this sort of stuff.

It happens all the time. The results are quoted in full in the published research, which is why we can calculate the actual outcomes. They had breakpoints during the program probably because they realised the high drop-out rate would affect the result. This however allowed them to derive a "success" figure using the previous breakpoint as a baseline, rather than the starting cohort, which is what we'd be interested in.

All that's really needed, though, is to produce a press release claiming "36% success", which the media will print uncritically, and most people reading it will never look at the actual published paper. You can't be accused of fudging the figures based on what the media report. It's one reason why I don't ever take a press/media report at face value.

For a fun read about how this works from the media side, I'd recommend this link: