Thanks for the link. To not be biased on this, here's a part of the abstract you didn't quote.

Increasing carbohydrate intake from high-GI foods was also significantly associated with greater risk of CHD in women (RR, 1.68; 95% CI, 1.02-2.75), whereas increasing the intake of low-GI carbohydrates was not.

Here's the whole abstract:

Dietary Glycemic Load and Index and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in a Large Italian Cohort
The EPICOR Study

Sabina Sieri, PhD; Vittorio Krogh, MD, MS; Franco Berrino, MD; Alberto Evangelista, BSc; Claudia Agnoli, PhD; Furio Brighenti, PhD; Nicoletta Pellegrini, PhD; Domenico Palli, MD; Giovanna Masala, MD; Carlotta Sacerdote, MD; Fabrizio Veglia, MD; Rosario Tumino, MD; Graziella Frasca, PhD; Sara Grioni, BSc; Valeria Pala, PhD; Amalia Mattiello, MD; Paolo Chiodini, PhD; Salvatore Panico, MD
Arch Intern Med. 2010;170(7):640-647.

Background  Dietary glycemic load (GL) and glycemic index (GI) in relation to cardiovascular disease have been investigated in a few prospective studies with inconsistent results, particularly in men. The present EPICOR study investigated the association of GI and GL with coronary heart disease (CHD) in a large and heterogeneous cohort of Italian men and women originally recruited to the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition study.

Methods  We studied 47 749 volunteers (15 171 men and 32 578 women) who completed a dietary questionnaire. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards modeling estimated adjusted relative risks (RRs) of CHD and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).

Results  During a median of 7.9 years of follow-up, 463 CHD cases (158 women and 305 men) were identified. Women in the highest carbohydrate intake quartile had a significantly greater risk of CHD than did those in the lowest quartile (RR, 2.00; 95% CI, 1.16-3.43), with no association found in men (P = .04 for interaction). Increasing carbohydrate intake from high-GI foods was also significantly associated with greater risk of CHD in women (RR, 1.68; 95% CI, 1.02-2.75), whereas increasing the intake of low-GI carbohydrates was not. Women in the highest GL quartile had a significantly greater risk of CHD than did those in the lowest quartile (RR, 2.24; 95% CI, 1.26-3.98), with no significant association in men (P = .03 for interaction).

Conclusion  In this Italian cohort, high dietary GL and carbohydrate intake from high-GI foods increase the overall risk of CHD in women but not men.

The strongest correlation was with all carbohydrates, which is what I highlighted.  If you exclude low GI carbohydrates, the significance goes down; if you exclude high GI carbohydrates, the significance also goes down, below the 95% threshhold.  That all just indicates that the unbiased answer is that total carbohydrates is the important part, and making excuses based on the type of carbohydrate you eat is avoiding the answer.

I am just pointing out part of what the researches claimed for completeness. If the significance is below the 95% threshold we cannot deduce anything from it, you can only speculate. Lumping all carbohydrates together is like lumping all fats together (vegetable oils along with butter, makes no sense) which doesn't really tell us much.

Why be fast to dismiss studies that lump together processed and unprocessed meats and not dismiss studies that lump together all kinds of carbohydrates. The double standard doesn't help anyone. I would definitely agree that the amount of carbohydrates westerners eat is not good for the heart, but when analyzing this data you cannot have that double standard. Your "answer" is not unbiased.

However, in the case of carbohydrates, the results from high glycemic index carbohydrates are lower than the results from all carbohydrates, so it can't just be the high glycemic index carbohydrates that are bad.  Thus, the important result here is the "all carbohydrates" result.

There just isn't a significance for low GI carbs.

Anyways, this is just an epi study. If we believed these kind of studies we would probably be eating a very different diet.

Men and women are different :-) though specifically in the context of this study the difference probably has to do less with carbohydrate metabolism and more with the empirical fact that the women have much less CHD than men. The study mentions that "Lipoprotein metabolism is about twice as fast in women as men because of the stimulatory effects of estrogen in women and the inhibitory effects of androgen in men".

Other than that, I hope everyone realizes that the 95% statistical significance cutoff is just a convention, an arbitrary threshold. For example, the probabilities of 94% and 96% are very close (and really indistinguishable in high-noise studies) although one we'd call "statistically significant" and the other "statistically insignificant".

Linear measures (e.g. correlation) are also not the only ones around. Look at the data for men, carb consumption by quartiles and the number of CVD cases:

Quartile 1 -- 105 cases
Quartile 2 --  59 cases
Quartile 3 --  75 cases
Quartile 4 --  66 cases

Clearly, a linear model fails here, but that almost doubling of the heart cases between quartiles 1 and 2 seems too big to be pure noise. Maybe there's a threshold effect somewhere there? I wish the data from the study were available so that I could slice it and dice it to my satisfaction... Although, of course, there's huge amount of noise here -- food questionnaires are notoriously unreliable, all their independent variables are correlated with each other, etc. etc. I bet this study was expensive, one might have thought they'd take care to improve its statistical efficiency, so to say.

Kaa