#503: Lyon Diet Heart Study – Canola Oil, "Mediterranean" Diets & Minimizing Bias
Sigma Nutrition Radio
Danny Lennon
4.8 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2023
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
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About This Episode:
The Lyon Diet Heart Study (LDHS) is often cited as one of the pivotal studies that helped establish the Mediterranean diet as a recognized and recommended dietary pattern for cardiovascular health.
A clinical trial conducted in Lyon, France, the LDHS showed significant reduction in cardiac death could be achieved in secondary prevention patients using a dietary intervention.
Conducted between 1992 to 1996, the study involved 605 participants who had previously experienced a heart attack (myocardial infarction).
LDHS showed an incredible 75% lower risk of cardiac death in these patients. This remarkable reduction was unexpected and led to considerable attention from the medical and scientific communities.
LDHS is interesting to dig into for several reasons. First, it's clever methodology was able to account for some challenges of doing nutrition research. Second, the dietary intervention, whilst named as a "Mediterranean diet", should perhaps be considered differently.
In this episode, Alan and Danny dig into all the details, highlighting some important lessons we can take from LDHS.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 503 of the podcast. My name is Danny Lennon and of course, alongside me is Dr. Alan Flanagan. |
| 0:24.0 | Alan, how are you today? Very well. We're on the road to 1,000 now. |
| 0:28.7 | Feels like Sisyphus. The boulder has rolled back to the bottom. It's rolled back down. |
| 0:32.4 | What do I do now? Yeah, and now we're facing the moment. The choice of going back down to voluntarily push it back up the hill. |
| 0:39.6 | And knowing that there's no point to any of it. |
| 0:41.6 | No, no. |
| 0:43.0 | When we get the boulder back to the top, we'll still be arguing about seed oils on the internet. |
| 0:48.0 | Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| 0:49.2 | Why have you forsaken? |
| 0:50.4 | Yeah, why have the gods forsaken us? |
| 0:52.9 | But here we are damned to eternity. |
| 0:55.8 | Indeed. And in this initial run into the 500s, we're continuing on with another diet |
| 1:01.4 | heart study. Today we're talking about the Leon Diet Heart Study, which in contrary to the Sydney |
| 1:07.1 | Diet Heart Study, where we showed how much hype has been made about a trial that |
| 1:11.6 | doesn't really tell us all that much. There's some really nice aspects to the Leon Diet |
| 1:16.8 | Heart Study that we're going to dive into today and hopefully connects to a number of our previous |
| 1:22.1 | episodes in relation to diet and heart disease. Now, with the Leon Diet Heart Study, we're talking about this trial |
| 1:29.6 | that's taking place between 1992 and 1996. So maybe as a way to frame this, Alan, maybe let's remind |
| 1:36.3 | people at this particular time, where were we in relation to diet, heart disease research |
| 1:42.7 | overall, to Mediterranean diet research at this time. |
| 1:47.1 | Can you maybe place some of that context for what was going on? |
| 1:50.9 | Yeah, so by the time that this study is being conceived and initiated and conducted, |
... |
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