The Carb-Sane Asylum

This will be a revolving blog post, that shall get bumped up every time I add a study where habitual intake -- aka baseline -- has been determined/reported prior to a dietary intervention.  It's time to collect this data in one place, as in study after study, I have noted that Americans are not eating a low fat diet, nor a particularly high carb diet, despite the very modest percent reductions in NHANES surveys.   I reserve the right to add in studies in industrialized/Westernized populations as honorary dietary Americans.   Newest additions will be on top.

When I teach stats, we discuss a bit how numbers can be used to deliver alarmist messages. Using a generic Compound X that shows no toxic effects up to 100 units with single digit baseline levels, we discuss how varying increases in X might be reported.  So let's say baseline levels of X are 2 units.  Something is done, and levels of X rise to 3 units and this change reaches the level of statistical significance.  The alarmist reporting that gives the greatest impact would probably be to state something like:  "levels of X increased by 50%".  This is true, and it sounds daunting taken out of context.  Alternately you might see something like "levels of X were 1.5 times baseline", though I think the 50% number has more impact.  For anything less than 10X increase, the alarmist reporting almost always uses the percents, because over 100% has emotional intuitive impact.  So for example if X values rose to 4 units, "X values doubled" has impact, but "...