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How do the meat and dairy industries design studies that show their products have neutral or even beneficial effects on cholesterol and inflammation?

Observational studies like “Milk and Dairy Consumption and Risk of Cardiovascular Diseases and All-Cause Mortality: Dose-Response Meta-Analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies,” which suggests that dairy might not be so bad, can be confounded by extraneous factors, such as the fact that people who eat more cheese tend to be of “a higher socioeconomic status.” In that case, what about an interventional study? Researchers designed a randomized, crossover trial that compared a high-fat cheese diet to a high-fat meat diet to a “nondairy, low-fat, high-carbohydrate” control diet. Both the high-cheese and high-meat diets were loaded with saturated fat, but all of the study participants, including those on the low-fat diet, ended up with the same cholesterol levels. And, it should be noted that the study was overwhelmingly paid for by the dairy industry.

So, how did they do it? If you’re in the dairy industry and trying to design a study to show that a high-cheese diet does not raise cholesterol, how would you go about doing that? This is the topic of my video Friday Favorites: How the Dairy Industry Designs Misleading Studies.

Anyone remember my video BOLD Indeed: Beef Lowers Cholesterol? It’s one of my favorites. The beef industry was in the same pickle as the cheese industry: Beef has saturated fat, which raises cholesterol, which raises the risk of dying from our number one killer. What’s an industry to do? Well, as you can see at 1:20 in my video, it designed a study in which beef was added and cholesterol went down. How is that possible? It was achieved by cutting out so much dairy, poultry, pork, fish, and eggs that their overall saturated fat intake was cut in half. Indeed, saturated fat levels were cut in half, and cholesterol levels went down. Well, of course that happened. They could have swapped in Twinkies and claimed that snack cakes lower your cholesterol…or frosting…or anything.

So, now you know the trick. The way to get the same cholesterol levels is to make sure all three diets have the same amount of saturated fat. How are you going to get a high-fat cheese diet and a high-fat meat diet to have the same saturated fat level as a diet that has neither cheese nor meat? The researchers added so much coconut oil and cookies to the so-called low-fat diet that all three diets had the same amount of saturated fat and…voila! That’s how you can make it appear that a cheese- or meat-rich diet doesn’t raise cholesterol.

This reminds me of the desperation evident in a study that compared the effects of dairy cheddar cheese to a nondairy cheddar cheese called Daiya. Milk consumption has plummeted in recent years as people have increasingly discovered plant-based alternatives, like soymilk and almond milk, and now there are plant-based cheese alternatives. What’s the National Dairy Council to do? How are you going to design a study that shows it’s healthier to eat dairy cheese? Well, you design a study where dairy cheese causes less inflammation than the vegan alternative. They had their work cut out for them. Daiya is no health food by any stretch, but it definitely has three times less saturated fat than cow’s milk cheese. So, how did they show the study participants got more inflammation from Daiya?

There is one fat that may cause more inflammation than milk fat: palm oil. In fact, palm oil may raise cholesterol levels as much as trans-fat-laden partially hydrogenated oil. And, you’ve probably guessed it: They slipped the Daiya group some extra palm oil on the side. Can you believe it? They compared cow’s milk cheese to Daiya nondairy cheese plus palm oil. In fact, there was so much extra palm oil that the vegan meal ended up having the same amount of saturated fat as the cheese meal. That’s like proving tofu is worse than beef by doing a study where they compared a beef patty to a tofu patty stuffed with lard. Oh, wait. The meat industry already did that! But, at least they had the decency to concede that “replacement of meat with tofu in the habitual diet would not usually be accompanied by the addition of butter and lard.”

Does tea tree oil have enough antiviral activity to combat HSV-1 and papilloma viruses, the causes of cold sores and common warts, respectively?

“It has been reported that essential oils show not only anti-bacterial and anti-fungal activities but also antiviral activity.” As well, it’s been reported that “Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack as Love Slave,” according to in a headline in the Weekly World News. What does the science show?

How about pitting essential oils against HSV-1, the herpes virus that causes cold sores? There’s a drug called acyclovir that helps, but now there are drug-resistant strains of the virus, so researchers have been looking for other alternatives. As you can see at 0:40 in my video Benefits of Tea Tree Oil for Warts and Cold Sores, researchers found that a variety of essential oils, including tea tree oil and peppermint, could totally suppress the replication of the virus at a concentration of just 1 percent, but that was in a petri dish. What about in people?

Recurrent cold sores affect as many as 20 to 40 percent of the population. Tea tree oil appeared to work in vitro, so researchers undertook a randomized, placebo-controlled study to evaluate the efficacy of topically applied tea tree oil in the treatment of recurrent cold sores. When comparing a 6 percent tea tree oil gel versus a placebo gel five times a day, researchers found that the average healing time seemed to be a few days shorter and the virus was wiped out a little earlier with the tea tree oil. However, “none of the differences between groups reached statistical significance,” meaning that a difference that small could have just been due to chance. They blamed the sample size, but maybe tea tree oil just didn’t work.

It would be interesting to put lemongrass oil to the test, since it was the only essential oil in the study still effective at wiping out viral activity at a dose that was ten times lower—0.1 percent—but it doesn’t look like that’s ever been done.

What about warts? They’re caused by viruses, too. Irish researchers reported a case of successful topical treatment of tea tree oil on hand warts in a pediatric patient. A seven-year-old girl had six warts on the tip of one of her fingers, so heavily clustered as to distort the appearance of her finger, interfering with her writing and piano lessons. She had undergone the standard caustic treatment of painting the warts with acid, but they just came back with a vengeance. So, her doctors figured, why not?, and suggested applying straight tea tree oil. After five days, all of the warts had “considerably reduced in size,” and, in another week, they were all gone, and they didn’t come back.

Not bad compared to conventional wart treatments, which can be really painful. Indeed, in this case, the tea tree oil appeared to work without any side effects, only affecting the warts, in contrast to the standard acid treatments that can damage the surrounding tissue. So, the researchers made an urgent call for randomized, controlled trials, but who’s going to fund those when tea tree oil costs only pennies per dose? The reason we’d particularly like to see randomized trials for wart treatments is that they tend to get better on their own, disappearing without any treatment typically within a year or two. That’s why, “Since antiquity it has been believed that warts can be removed by various magical processes.” You pay some witch doctor, your warts go away on their own, and they take the credit.

Surprisingly, such “charming” of warts was actually put to the test and had no effect on the warts. It’s interesting how they do those types of studies, though. For example, one study tested whether warts can be prayed away. The researchers used a placebo prayer, so the participants didn’t know whether they were in the prayed-for group or the placebo-prayer group. They did this to exclude the possibility that participants mind-over-mattered their own wart cure. That’s been put to the test, too. In another study, one from the 1960s, researchers used a “magic” wand secretly connected to a circuit such that it tingled when the wand touched the wart to maximize any placebo effect. And, wrote the scientists, the patients were predominantly “Negroes who were mostly unsophisticated and who had a very deep belief in magic.” Yet, despite the participants’ purported “deep belief in magic,” more warts actually disappeared spontaneously in the untreated group compared to the magic-wanded ones, with no hint of the mere suggestion of magical cures being effective.

I was surprised studies like this were not only performed but published in respected journals. Evidently publication followed a “considerable discussion” among the journal editors, who said they “promised to keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out.”