Posts Tagged ‘scientific rigor’

The President of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, announced his resignation this week, following a review of his research that concluded some of it “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process.” If you entertain any doubt about the importance of attention to scientific rigor and integrity, this should resolve it. Retractions and Corrections After […]

New research today in the New England Journal of Medicine offers an important lesson – for anyone with an open mind. Finding an association of a dietary pattern with a better health outcome is not the same as showing that a dietary pattern has that effect. Eight years ago, Martha Clare Morris and colleagues told […]

Since January, when the American Academy of Pediatrics released a guideline for treating the disordered physiology of children and youth with obesity, we’ve been inundated with popular psychology influencers concerned about the impact on young persons with disordered eating. Their arguments are quite passionate. “Obesity guidelines for kids terrify me,” says one person with a […]

Two researchers from the Harvard Medical School tell us we cannot have confidence in findings the World Health Organization gleaned from nutrition science related to sweeteners. But the problem is not limited to sweeteners. Writing in the New York Times, Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham say the problem afflicts much of nutrition research: “This is […]

An appealing narrative is seductive. Recently, we tripped over a case study in this basic fact when a new study in Nature Metabolism stirred up considerable attention from health reporters with claims about “severely impaired” brain responses to nutrients in humans with obesity. But in retrospect, there’s an plausible argument that the analyses were impaired […]

Expert opinion holds that ultra-processed food is not a good thing. So it’s quite natural to expect that helping people resist the convenience and taste of this ubiquitous type of food will help with dietary health outcomes. So natural that it’s quite easy to dismiss inconvenient, unexpected findings. A little ultra-processing of study results in […]

An “impassioned polemic” is headed our way from British media doctor Chris van Tulleken and it aims to have us excise ultra-processed from our dietary habits. No doubt about it, ultra-processed food wins the prize for today’s best food boogeyman, but how wise is this bit of food fear based on correlation without a cause. […]

Breathtaking. That’s the only word we can find to describe the claims coming from a cost effectiveness study of calorie labeling on restaurant menus for preventing cancer deaths. Published yesterday in BMJ Open, this study is already generating headlines like this one: “Thanks to calorie-counting menus, fewer Americans are dying of obesity-related cancers” Making an […]

“Exercise with a buddy, your brain will thank you,” says the Washington Post. “Improve Your Memory, Problem-Solving, and Mental Processing Speeds in Just 6 Minutes,” promises Inc. This is just a small sample of the exuberant claims about exercise and brain health coming at us from news media. There’s only one problem. Some of it […]

We face a pivot point for public health strategies to prevent obesity. The advent of advanced medicines for obesity treatment brings critical questions. Can we find better strategies for preventing obesity at the entrance to causal pathways for it? Or will we instead depend solely on medical interventions to reduce the harm it causes? These […]