Posts Tagged ‘scientific integrity’

The human impulse for bigotry is strong. Lifestyle Medicine, an open access journal, offered up a potent illustration of this yesterday. The journal published a dubious study of a weak association between a poor measure of intelligence and obesity. It’s hard to know why, but scientific merit doesn’t explain it. Nor can any excuse justify […]

We’re having trust issues. The world is facing a pandemic, but the solutions are not obvious. Headlines are full of reasons to mistrust governments that should be leading us through this crisis. Science offers a promising beacon for some. But others are dismissive. Make no mistake about it, all over the world, people are having […]

The scientific literature on childhood obesity is a bit dodgy in places. Lots of well-meaning people do studies to prove a point rather than discover hard truths. Obesity evokes emotion and stigma, especially for children. Because stigma is in play, scientific rigor can take second place. In scientific journals, papers about childhood obesity can appear […]

More experience with COVID-19 tells us that the relationship between COVID-19 and cardiometabolic health is more than a passing thing. It starts with the risk that obesity confers for worse outcomes with COVID-19. That was the first clue. But that’s not the end of it. Because people are learning that the effects of COVID-19 can […]

It seems today the mistrust of official health advice and spread of “alternative” treatments for COVID-19 are as frightening as the virus itself. How is it that so many people are ill-informed (and seemingly choose to be so) about the pandemic, despite decades of compulsory science education? Of course we are entering a post-truth era […]

Correcting errors is such a nuisance. People feel bad about it. Some people simply can’t admit errors, so it can get messy. But errors are inevitable. Thus it’s really important to correct errors when they are discovered. Especially in scientific research. Nonetheless, one journal seems to have a different solution. Nutrients – an open-access nutrition […]

How are we doing these days on quizzes of true and false? In public affairs, it’s become quite a challenge. In nutrition and obesity science, the challenge is nothing new. Some things are clearly true. Obesity is a highly heritable condition, for one example. Other things are clearly false. For example, to lose one pound […]

Dishonesty is in the news a lot lately. So naturally, when a study of dishonesty, hunger, and obesity pops up, it garners our attention. The study is an interesting cognitive science experiment. Ironically though, the paper leads with a false claim about dishonesty and causality. The misleading claim is right there, in the paper’s title: […]

Nature Metabolism scored big this week with PR for a study on blood sugar and exercise. The study looked at hyperglycemia and exercise training. With lots of attention on Twitter and in the news media, it scored in the 98th percentile for commanding public attention. But the attention it got didn’t line up very well […]

Obesity? No problem! Obesity? OMG, you better lose weight or COVID will get you! Remember the information age? It’s been canceled. We are living in the misinformation age. And there’s nothing like a pandemic to fuel the market for misinformation. The intersection of obesity risks and COVID-19 risks is adding to it. Two opposite but […]