One thing you can be sure of in this life is that things aren't always as they appear.
A good example was the way newspapers, magazines and TV went somewhat gaga a few weeks ago with a story that seemed to puncture the oat bran balloon.A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine seemed to indicate that the stuff didn't significantly cut blood cholesterol.
The story got big play across the country.
I confess to great interest in anything involving cholesterol ever since I acquired some new plumbing in my chest some years back. I eat oat bran every day. So I got busy on the phone and discovered that the big news wasn't so big at all.
Dr. James Anderson, a leading expert, criticized the study. He said he found it contained "shortcomings."
"I know of 12 studies that have shown that oat bran lowers cholesterol," Anderson said. "All were done in a good clinical setting without the shortcomings of this one. The 13th study doesn't wipe out all the previous work."
Anderson believes oat bran "is one of our best foods to lower cholesterol." He sees a danger in studies like the new one "is that people will walk away with the idea that oat bran didn't have any effect."
Anderson heads the Metabolic Research Group at the University of Kentucky Medical School and is also chief of endocrinology at the Veterans Hospital in Lexington.
Among Anderson's criticisms was the fact that oat bran "works better for those with high cholesterol, and the group in this study had normal cholesterol." The group tested had cholesterol levels averaging in the 180s.
Another problem was that study subjects knew they were in the oat bran segment. Anderson said such studies "need to be blinded, so participants can't consciously or unconsciously alter their nutrient intake of fat or cholesterol or physical activities."
The study also didn't match up fat identically in the diets used, creating a major difference in fat intake by participants.
He also is critical of the study because it used a "rather archaic form of statistical approach," not used in medicine or anywhere else for the past 20 years.
Anderson also found a mathematical error, which reported that the HDL, or so-called "good" cholesterol, level was not signicantly raised by oat bran. "When we calculated this from the study's information, it was clear that oat bran had raised the HDL," he said.
Anderson is concerned that widely publicized studies like this one and articles like a recent Atlantic Monthly piece are misleading.
"The great volume of medical literature, the great consensus, is that less fat, less cholesterol reduces the danger of heart attack," Anderson said.
Robert E. Kowalski, author of the best-selling book that sent oat bran's popularity soaring, found the study "skewed against oat bran." He thinks it was designed that way.
One of the problems he found with it was that the 20 individuals in the study all averaged cholesterol levels of 186, considered normal. "You couldn't expect much reduction in their cholesterol," he said.
If there's an oat bran guru, he has to be Kowalski.
He had a heart attack and bypass surgery at 35 and a second bypass six years later. His book, "The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure," came out in 1987 and was an instant best seller. Kowalski sticks faithfully to the diet (with oat bran) he developed and says his cholesterol is "normal" despite the fact he's "working harder than I've ever worked and have a very stressful schedule."
The author said he recently went to the Heart Institute of the Desert in Palm Springs, Calif., to have an angiogram, a heart catheterization, to check his arterial condition.
"The doctor said the bypass vessel looks like it's as clean as the day it was put in," Kowalski said. "So I have no heart disease as such."
The angiogram confirms that Kowalski's doing something right and that oat bran is a big part of the "something."
I'm sticking with oat bran, too.