Have you seen it? It's all over the news today; a study in the New England Journal of Medicine "proving" that it doesn't matter if you choose a low fat diet, a low carb diet, or a Mediterranean diet. The only important thing, they say, is the calories.

We're back to "Just starve yourself for the rest of your life and you'll be fine." And we all know how well that works.

(Parenthetical note here: I recently talked to a soldier friend of mine about his Ranger training, during which he and his cohorts were kept on a near-starvation diet. Unsurprisingly, he reports that none of them could think of anything but food. Furthermore, as soon as he got out of Ranger training, he ate like a machine, gaining back not only the weight he'd lost in training, but several pounds more. And this is a man of uncommon discipline.

Folks, your body has very, very powerful mechanisms to force you to eat enough calories. That's why, despite the endless insistence on "eat less, exercise more," the track record of the calories in/calories out approach is pathetic.)

Once again, we have a study that appears to have been set up to "prove" exactly what the authors already believed. This one is so transparent, I nearly beat my head against my keyboard. I expect better from the Harvard School of Public Health, but am sad to say that I've gotten to the point where malarky like this doesn't surprise me anymore.

The study looked at 811 overweight people, 40% men and 60% women. They were randomly assigned one of four diets, and told to cut their calorie intake by 750 calories per day. After two years, the results were about the same regardless of which diet the participants had been on.

But here's the thing -- The diets shaped up thusly:

A low fat/low protein diet: 20% fat, 15% protein, 65% carbs.

A low fat/high protein diet: 20% fat, 25% protein, 55% carbs.

A high fat/average protein diet: 40% fat, 15% protein, 45% carbs.

A high fat/high protein diet: 40% fat, 25% protein, 35% carbs.

Furthermore, I have been able to glean from reading various newspaper accounts of this study, that, "Though the diets were twists on commercial plans, the study did not directly compare popular diets. The four diets contained healthy fats, were high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables and were low in cholesterol."

Also, according the Indy Star, "The study compared high quality, heart healthy diets and "not the gimmicky popular versions," said Katz (Dr. David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center , who had no role in the study.) Some popular low-carb diets tend to be low in fiber and have a relatively high intake of saturated fat, he said."

In other words, no one in this study was actually eating a low carb diet. Not a single soul.

Average calorie intake among participants appears to have been between 1400 and 1800 calories per day. Let's do a little math:

We'll go with the average of the two, or 1600 calories per day. 1600 x .35 = 560 calories from carbohydrate in the lowest carb version. Dividing 560 calories by 4 calories per gram of carb, we get 140 grams of carbohydrate per day on the "low carb diet."

Furthermore, I know my low carb diet gets a lot more than 40% of its calories from fat. According to my records, I got 70% of my calories from fat yesterday. Repeated studies have demonstrated that a very high fat, very low carb diet results in far more weight loss than the same number of calories weighted toward more carb and protein, less fat.

The researchers commented that they tried to make their diets "heart healthy," low in cholesterol and saturated fats. This tells me that they're working with a paradigm I consider to be thoroughly disproven.

Finally, despite the media rush to crow about how this study "proves" that it's "still all about calories," only ten percent of the participants on any of the diets managed to keep off as much as 10% of their body weight by the two year mark. This is a success for calorie restriction how?

For all you research scientists out there doing studies like these: I am not a scientist. Hell, I don't even have a bachelor's degree. I'm just a reasonably intelligent layperson who has a long-time interest in nutrition. If I can see the holes in your research this easily, what the heck is wrong with you?