If you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, or if you just consume a large variety of such products, you may have a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to the results of a new study published in the journalDiabetes Care.
In much the same way that the story above, on berries and memory, induced many an eye roll at the ACSH table this morning, the current study produced similar reactions. Researchers from the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge, U.K. followed over 3,700 adults for 11 years. At the start of the study, all of the participants kept a week-long food diary and, of the one-third who had the highest daily intake of fruits and vegetables (six servings, on average), one-sixth went on to develop type 2 diabetes. That compared with one-fifth of the participants in the lowest third of fruit and veggie intake (about two servings per day).
But it seems that, in addition to quantity, quality also mattered: People who ate an average of 16 different types of fruits and veggies per week were about 40 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, compared to participants who consumed only eight different varieties.
Lead study author D. Nita G. Forouhi believed that the association between the variety of produce consumed and diabetes was new and exciting yet she also acknowledged that weight, exercise levels, smoking, and education differences could play an important factor. Dr. Forouhi s team (as is always stated in such studies) allegedly controlled for all the myriad relevant confounding factors, and still found that a higher intake of fruits and vegetables was linked to a 21 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. It remains possible, however, that some other unaccounted factor could be responsible for the study results, she concedes.
You think? ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross asks. This is yet one more example of the increasingly-common statistical flim-flam known as data dredging. There is nothing here that even rises to the level of valid evidence-based science this is simply a retrospective manipulation of stats and figures to produce the results the researchers were hoping for the whole time.
Which is not to say that eating your fruits and veggies isn t a good thing. But we needed another study to tell us this?