Opinion : Healthy Living

Recent medical studies have been striking at the heart of common nutrition guidance lately by showing no benefit to the people who follow these programs. The NIH lately has been funding large pharmaceutical-quality trials to look into common health problems recently. These trials are very accurate because they are multi-center (no geographic bias), double blind, (no apriori bias) and include a huge number of participants (high statistical significance).
Surprisingly to health buffs but not so surprisingly to some scientists, these studies keep finding null results. One study involved the question of whether eating a low fat, high fiber diet reduces risk of cancer in older people. A now famous study, which I cannot find, shows that by country, the less meat and calories eaten per capita, the less risk of cancer there is. Now I would argue that this is somewhat foolish because first of all, countries that eat less meat tend to be poorer and have other health problems associated with poverty. I would also point out that individuals within a country tend to be closely genetically related (except the US) and this study is useless unless it can correct for local genetic differences. Either way, conventional wisdom is that healthy eating means less cancer. Unfortunately, recent studies find no correlation. The only thing this seems to help is you heart, which is a good reason to eat healthy, but don't expect it to effect your oncogenes.
A similar study looked at giving calcium supplements to older women to prevent bone loss. Now the logic here is clear: postmenopausal women have too little calcium, so give them more of it. Cynics would say that this solution is the equivalent of sprinting the last mile of a marathon after walking the first 25. The studies showed that the cynics were right, calcium supplements do little to bone density in old age, and several scientists claimed that they always said that bones must be built when the person is still growing to function properly in life. My cynical spin on these two studies is that we need to stop fighting and learn to love genetic determinism. The fact is, if you have genes that predispose you to cancer or osteoporosis, there is not much you can do to prevent it.
Another area the NIH and the FDA have been interested is the effectiveness of non-regulated health supplements. Another recent study focused on the effects of glucosimine and condriton on joint pain. This study also gave some patients Vioxx (or similar cox-2 inhibitor) which is the current clinical treatment for this condition. Well it turns out that G and C did no better at making people feel better than sugar pills, which oddly enough made two thirds of the subjects feel better. Of course the Vioxx made nearly all the subjects feel better (and in theory only caused 1 in 10000 of them to have strokes...) which seems to strike a blow for herbal medicine. Now some people would argue that since G and C is all-natural and has few side effects, who cares if people take it as long as they think they feel better. I will argue , however, that the millions of dollars that are spent on these useless herbal cures would be much better spent on serious medical research on drugs that actually work, such as making Vioxx safer. Also, sugar pills are much more affordable (and tasty) ...