Posts Tagged ‘scientific integrity’

When people are desperate, magical thinking abounds. Even at the New York Times. Right now, you can read about how Silicon Valley technology is going to “tackle weight loss and diabetes with video chats.” With the help of mock apple cobbler and veggie omelets, an accountant and her husband have lost 120 pounds and avoided taking insulin. […]

Biostatisticians can be very helpful when they save someone from an embarrassing mistake. They can be frustrating when a person has already made the mistake. The frustration scenario comes out loud and clear in a case that Retraction Watch investigated this week. Claiming Efficacy Without Proving It Back in February, ConscienHealth reported on the mysterious […]

Complexity makes lousy sound bites. That basic fact of political life makes good health policy for obesity maddeningly difficult. We start with the fact that obesity is a complex, chronic disease. And then that complexity is multiplied by a complex environment. Health policies to reduce obesity must influence that environment. To make good policy for obesity, confessing to […]

It started with a blog post. Brian Wansink wrote an entry for his blog and called it “The Grad Student Who Never Said No.” It quickly turned into a sticky mess. The essay described an unpaid grad student from Turkey with energy and enthusiasm for exploring data in Wansink’s lab. Wansink is famous for clever research […]

The idea that sitting is the new smoking has taken off. This compelling narrative – that your desk chair is killing you – is so titillating that you’ll find 33 million results on Google. We have an ample supply of infographics, books, TED Talks, and more. Just one tiny problem is cropping up: hyperbole. Reviewing the Evidence […]

A new paper in the February issue of Pediatric Obesity probes an important question. Can a gardening, cooking, and nutrition program exert an effect on obesity risk for Latino youth? At first glance, the results are encouraging. Right there in the title, the authors answer the question. The LA Sprouts program “reduces obesity and metabolic […]

All that attention directed at fake news might be a blip on the viewscreen of popular culture. Or it might be an ongoing concern for years to come. One thing is clear, though. Interest in what is fake and what is genuine has been growing for most of a decade. Fakin’ it on social media […]

When does a hypothesis become a bias? One answer can be found in a recent publication about nutrition research in JAMA Internal Medicine. The authors – Nicholas Chartres, Alice Fabbri, and Lisa Bero – surmised that food industry sponsorship of research might generate outcomes that favor the sponsors. They conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis and found “insufficient evidence” […]

How much scientific rigor can you pack into a seminar about nutrition tweets? At the annual meeting of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in Boston yesterday, Cheryl Toner and Heather Mangieri proved you can pack quite a bit. All in the context of nutrition in popular culture. The video on the right – gently poking […]

Wishful thinking is pretty easy to find when the subject is fitness, nutrition, health, and obesity. Another label for it might be magical thinking. Unfortunately, health writers promote wishful thinking far too often. Here are three notorious forms of it: Exercise for Weight Loss. The myth that working out is a great way to lose weight is […]