Professor sifts through the hype in health news
By Ellen Creager
Knight Ridder News Service
DETROIT — Drinking Booze Prevents Heart Attacks!
Or that's what the headlines said last month.
While America scurried for the liquor cabinet, David Klurfeld headed instead for the New England Journal of Medicine. He would read the source report, examine the data, analyze conclusions and write a three-paragraph summary of what the research REALLY meant.
Then he would send it by e-mail to 33,000 people in 100 countries.
And they would pay attention.
"I don't even get minimum wage for doing this," says Klurfeld, grinning in his Detroit office on a cold January afternoon. Instead, Nutrition News Focus is his labor of love.
Evaluating food studies reported in journals and in the media, the authoritative, free e-mail newsletter is read by consumers, doctors, dietitians and journalists around the world.
Five days a week, the confident, friendly prose of Klurfeld reassures, cajoles or throws cold water on the latest nutrition news. Salt might not be so bad. Not everyone needs vitamins. Tomatoes might or might not help your heart. Milk isn't evil.
A miracle of brevity, the newsletter contains a two-paragraph description of that day's subject, plus a one-paragraph "Here's What You Need to Know" summary. Readers can digest it faster than a Krispy Kreme doughnut.
In real life, Klurfeld is chairman of the Nutrition and Food Sciences Department at Wayne State University in Detroit.
The trim 52-year-old professor is a prodigious researcher. His biggest claim to fame is his 1981 research linking red wine to improved heart health. That connection later became known as the "French paradox" to explain why the wine-drinking French have low heart-attack rates despite a high-fat diet. He is editor of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. He teaches. He publishes. He consults.
So why is he spending all this time penning a newsletter for the unwashed masses?
"To counteract some of the absolute lies out there," he says.
Klurfeld despises the miracle promises, food alarmists and get-thin-quick schemes floating around the Web and on television.
The newsletter rejects 99 percent of advertising, sells no products, markets no mailing list and is free to readers.
Sure, Klurfeld does have help. His brother, Roger, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, and Ken Deifik, an old friend and Web expert in Los Angeles, run the business and post the newsletter. Klurfeld does the writing and they do the rest.
Deifik says the mission of Nutrition News Focus is simple. "It's a chance to do something really good, to make a difference," he says. "Reading it helps you tune up your B.S. detector."
Q. How seriously should we take new research findings?
A. "If all the press releases sent out by universities touting discoveries made by their faculty were true, every disease in the book would have been cured by now."
Klurfeld's tart prose has gained him a lot of fans. Tony Helman, an Australian physician and nutritionist, reads it daily on the other side of the world in Melbourne. He calls it "reliable and complementary and valuable."
But Klurfeld also has enemies in the nutrition world — diet doctors, vegetarians, animal-rights activists, organic food fans, supplement makers, even scientific colleagues. He has ripped them all in the newsletter and in scholarly articles, at his peril. For instance, he is featured on the "Frankenfoods Propagandists — a Rogue's Gallery" list posted on the Organic Consumers Association Web site. Why? One of his newsletters concluded there is no scientific proof that genetically modified food is dangerous.
Klurfeld, who lives in West Bloomfield, Mich., says most scientists are too timid to enter the public fray, preferring to let the public be duped by pitch men and crackpots on the Web and in advertising. At least he's in there swinging.
"Nobody is objective," he says. "I would like to say, 'Yes, I am the final word and arbiter of all things true,' but I'll willingly admit that I have as many biases as anyone else.
"People who subscribe to this are getting an educated opinion directly from an active researcher that's hard to get anywhere else."
Q. Should we believe government dietary guidelines and the food pyramid?
A. "I think every dietary recommendation should be prefaced with the words 'based on what we know today.' Why do we tell people 'this is what you must eat' when we are planning to change it every five years?"
Although Nutrition News Focus has no sponsors and is beholden to no person, company or group, Klurfeld himself isn't unaffiliated. He consults for the meat, cereal, soybean and dairy industries.
"Why shouldn't they ask me to be?" he says. Right now, he is helping the National Cattlemen's Beef Association evaluate research grant applications, and he has done beef research in the past. But he says most food studies at universities are initiated by researchers, not companies, and any researcher worth his salt will not fake or suppress findings to flatter a source of financing. "I will bite the hand that feeds me," he says.
Nutrition News Focus is not a one-way street. Avid readers write, e-mail, even call. Sometimes they beg for personal advice, something he will not give. Other times, they write in to blast him.
"I don't think there is anything wrong with dairy," he says. "And that has engendered a criticism from our readership." He also hears from vegetarians, low-fat fans and people who think he is too kind to the meat industry. After he wrote an article critical of vegetarianism for children, he got an e-mail from a reader named Rain.
"Were you PAID to make those comments. or is it possible that you could be so incredibly ignorant?" she wrote.
He wrote her back politely. Usually, though, "for people who think they know I am a crook and have been bought by industry, I don't respond, because once I do, they think it is a permanent dialogue," he says.
At Wayne State, Klurfeld teaches a class called "Controversial Topics in Nutrition" in which he tries to get undergraduates to critically evaluate supposed breakthrough studies.
About two-thirds of the public is interested in nutrition news, but most of them are confused, he says. One of the biggest sources of confusion? Whether one study should make people change their ways.
"The average person thinks every study in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) or Science is definitive — yes, there is life on Mars, yes, we evolved from monkeys, yes, we should eat leaves from trees," he says. "But I'd like to take two to three years of NEJM from 10 years ago and go back and see how much of it has been disproved. I would guess that half of it has been found to be false, based on further research. What appears in those journals is cutting-edge research, not established medical practice."
Nutrition knowledge is not static, and that makes it frustrating to the public, Klurfeld says. That's why he wants people to stay on top of it for one minute a day, five days a week.
"Don't eat too much of any one food," he says. "It is the only advice that isn't going anywhere."
