Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Today’s newspapers are all running front-page stories about a new study showing the benefits of a Mediterranean diet. However, one of Aaron Carroll’s sharp-eyed readers pointed out that Table S5 in the appendix shows that the only truly big difference between the test group and the control group was their consumption of olive oil and nuts, which participants in the test group were given free. Sure, enough, if you read down to the very end of the report, the authors say this:

The interventions were intended to improve the overall dietary pattern, but the major between-group differences involved the supplemental items. Thus, extra-virgin olive oil and nuts were probably responsible for most of the observed benefits of the Mediterranean diets.

I’d add one more thing. The researchers were studying the frequency of “end point” events: heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. Here are the raw numbers: in the test group (Mediterranean diet + nuts), the total number of all those events over the period of the study was 3.8 percent. In the control group it was 4.4 percent.

Now, these are statistically significant and probably represent a genuine result. But don’t get too excited. The participants were all over 55 and had either Type 2 diabetes or three major risk factors for cardivascular disease. So you’d expect them to be teetering on the edge of one of these end point events anyway. But even at that, the additional risk over five years from eating whatever you wanted was 0.6 percentage points. That’s not really a helluva lot.

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate