Worth a new thread, a comment made by my old gangster mate Dillinger.

"I went to have my eyes checked a while ago as part of my standard diabetic review; I’ve never had any laser treatment but have mild non-proliferative background retinopathy. All was well; with no changes. The consultant thought I had the eyes of someone who had had diabetes for half the time that I have.

I thought it would be worth asking the consultant’s view on supplements for eyes in particular lutein as I’m quite keen on them. She initially said there was some evidence that they improved the condition of the eye in diabetics, but then thought about it and said she didn’t advise me to take any because there were no long term studies on their safety; I thanked her and thought that’s a familiar answer.

It is of course the go-to response that people who don’t like low-carb use and you also get it in relation to pretty much anything positive in diabetic care but unorthodox. Just because a study shows a benefit we are told isn’t the whole picture; we don’t know what a decade or more of this would do to someone; and on the balance of probability you should therefore ignore the positive evidence. That sounds more than fishy to me; you can’t patent a vitamin and some vitamins compete directly with pharmaceuticals, they are therefore the enemy and need to be discredited and bumped from the market place to protect the margins on those expensive pills we are offered.

But does this work the other way? How many long term studies were there for statins before they became ubiquitous? 

How many long term studies are there on anything that cannot be patented and sold? Very few because they are very expensive and then when there are (say saturated fats and heart health as looked at in the Framington meta-analysis) they get ignored if they are not orthodox (that Framington study said that there was no suggestion of a relationship between saturated fats and heart disease).

There are a number of argument strategies that you can immediately ignore, for instance; ‘the thin edge of the wedge’ argument is just saying; let’s not discuss the point in hand let’s think about what would happen if we escalated the situation to a ridiculous level and judge that. Well, I think we can now ignore any ‘no long term studies’ arguments because at best it is saying ‘we don’t know and therefore it will harm you’ and at worst it is a method of not looking at the evidence to hand because that evidence fails an artificial test that may well be meaningless. How many long term studies have there been on the consumption of water for instance? None, I bet; certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence about what happens if you don’t have any or if you are unlucky enough to have far too much; but how about the steady day to day consumption of it? Not a sausage, yet I don’t see any warning signs on taps… 

Best 

Dillinger (for whom there have been no long term studies on)"

Eddie