Posts Tagged ‘scientific integrity’

It seems that conspiracy theories are so appealing that sometimes they lead people to lose the facts. So it was recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine when Aseem Malhotra and colleagues published an editorial blaming the food industry for misinformation about the role of exercise in obesity, saying: Many still wrongly believe that obesity is entirely […]

Facing facts can be tough in heated policy debates. So tough, in fact, that a minor trend of shopping for facts to support your views is at work in different ways, polluting the scientific literature. This trend is not entirely new. Both zealous advocates for a cause and business interests have always been motivated to […]

Everybody knows the behaviors that cause obesity, right? Wrong. It turns out that we’re a couple of steps away from that knowledge. A new study in the Journal of Public Health points out that we’re not even particularly good at measuring behaviors thought to contribute to obesity. Without good measurements, we can’t even be confident of […]

The prevailing bias in nutrition, health, and obesity appears to work in cycles. Sometimes conviction about what must be true gets out ahead of the data we actually have to support our presumptions. The last cycle kept us focused on dietary fat and cholesterol for decades. In the current cycle, sugar is public enemy #1. […]