Ever wonder why what is good for you today according to the latest study is what is bad for you according to tomorrow's study? Well, now we know:

https://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

This may be a bit technical for some of you but pretty much what it says that if you do enough studies you are going to find contradictory results, particularly when the thing being studied is complex (like the human body for example).

And who's funding the study.

Oh, we probably don't want to know.

This is what I know: eat less....exercise more....eat well (as in good food). The rest I'm not so sure about.

Link not working Akohekohe. Could you reload it please? Edit: did a copy and paste, worked for me then. Interesting article, seems to say you can use statistics to prove a study lied with statistics and the statistical methodology. Who would have thunk it?

Bill

There's a contentious subject... What is good food?

Let me word the questions and I'll get you the answers that you want to hear.

Next time somebody telephones to do a survey (and it's an election year so you WILL be called), ask who's funding the study. They won't tell you.

Fair's fair. If they won't tell me who is doing the asking, I won't give them any answers.

It is a bit of a complicated problem. These articles discuss the issue:
https://marginalrevolution.com/margin...st_publis.html
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/are-most-medical-studies-wrong/

The solution in part is to use more of a Bayesian analsyis, considering prior probability in doing research. As the authors of the above articles say:

1) In evaluating any study try to take into account the amount of background noise. That is, remember that the more hypotheses which are tested and the less selection which goes into choosing hypotheses the more likely it is that you are looking at noise.
2) Bigger samples are better. (But note that even big samples won't help to solve the problems of observational studies which is a whole other problem).
3) Small effects are to be distrusted.
4) Multiple sources and types of evidence are desirable.
5) Evaluate literatures not individual papers.
6) Trust empirical papers which test other people's theories more than empirical papers which test the author's theory.
7) As an editor or referee, don't reject papers that fail to reject the null.

Sir Humphrey explains how opinion polls are designed to return the results those commissioning the survey would like.

As cousin Eddie says: BINGO

Number one is to use common sense. Number two, use common sense. If you rely on someone else's opinion(and that includes studies), then you have use neither number one or two. Same thing goes with believing all the crap in the media.

Just for the fun of it, I answered a survey. It turned out to be a robo-thing with multiple choice answers. Unfortunately, their choices were obviously slanted. This wasn't a question, but this the way they went:

After one question like that, I hung up.

Sounds like the polls that my congressman sends out.

I am reminded of the Woody Allen film, whichever one it was, where he woke up in the future, and was given all the things that they thought were unhealthy in his time, but were considered healthy now.

I can vouch for dark chocolate, myself! I just tune out all "health studies" now. The basics are the same, and that's where everyone falls down in their quests for the miracle compounds of the week like carotinoids, resveritrol, vitamins a through z, and many others.

I changed my blood pressure just by letting go of the old "drink 8 glasses of water a day", and only drinking when I'm thirsty, and I dropped my cholesterol without even exercising, and without "diet"ing, just by changing my diet in a basic way; cut way back on fried foods and red meat, and eating mostly veggies with just a bit of low-fat white meat like turkey or chicken.

Now I'm also bicycling on all those little errands that used to be done by car. I find that many little trips to the grocery store on a bike works just as well as letting the list grow to do all at once via the car. My other little pet habit now, is never use "electric" or "automatic" when manual gets the job done. When in the car, I park quickly, at the back of the lot, and walk. When I need to open a can, I use a hand-crank can opener from the 1960's. I trim the edges with hand clippers rather than a weed-whacker. I'm eschewing (hope I spelled that correctly) much of the "labor saving" convenience of the modern world, because the convenience was killing me! (and as insult to injury, it was costing me energy money, to pay for the privilege of killing myself!)

I recently made the mistake of taking a survey regarding my 2010 4 Runner. I owned a 2007 4 Runner and would still be driving it if it didn't get totaled in a crash. The newer model pales when compared with the older. The survey did not allow for any input other than the pre-selected answers which were vague or could be massaged by a marketing group.

I can't remember the name of the movie either but I do remember that two of the things on the healthy list were smoking and hot fudge.

Sleeper.

This is so true.
I use my Mother as an example. About 5 years ago when she was in her early 70's, she was part of a study where the measured weight, BMI, bone density, and a bunch of other stuff. She was off the charts for her age group, measuring well above the average. She said it is because when she worked, she had a job where she was on her feet all day walking & lifting. When she is working in the kitchen, she hardly ever uses a hand mixer, she uses a wooden spoon or a whisk. She does her dishes by hand. Weather permitting, she hangs her laundry outside. She has a big garden. She use to do all the yard work, but this year she hired a company to do it, but even then, it was not because she could not do it, it is because she is spending more & more time caring for my Dad who has Alzheimer's. The human body was made to be a hunter/gatherer, moving all day, and we have gotten so far away from that.

I like to recall all the studies done on coffee the past 30yrs. Gives you cancer, promotes digestion, high blood pressure, promotes heart health (I'm not totally exaggerating but you get my drift).

Studies are in....dont pay attention to the studies.

.....carrying with it the implication that it's ok to eat meat.

Sabrett hot dogs from a cart in NYC......

60% of all statistics you read on the internet are made up

I suppose that the real issue is that people are coming to distrust the results of research, and more so when the findings of research flies in the face of everyday custom, habit or knowledge.

That distrust is made worse when so-called research has been used to get products on to the market that then cause issues requiring them to be recalled or to be withdrawn entirely.

Even here on BFs, we get people posting links or quoting "research" that can alarm people and flies in the face of sounds advice. Often these research studies comprise an N of less than 50, and have set out to prove a pet hypothesis of an undergrad student, rather than an underlying medical or other issue.

And marketing? Well, we all know about spin. I had a chat to a guy in charge of data-gathering and interpretation for a State Government's tourism department. He said he could manipulate any figures to show the complete opposite of what they actually said, depending on what the message was the government was trying to send out at the time. He might have been partly tongue in cheek in what he said, but I can't help but think it was 90% true.

And it probably wasn't the OP's intent for this thread to spin off the way it has. The article does deal with medical research, but it also does, in the summary page, highlight that point about financial interest and other prejudice.

There's also the fact that what people get aren't the studies themselves, but the pre-digested, and often misrepresented, summaries of what the studies supposedly mean, as presented to us by clueless mass media outlets.

There has never been something so good for you that, in excess it isn't bad for you, nor something so bad for you that, in small enough amounts, it isn't good for you. Everything is a hodge-podge of good and bad effects. So long as you stick to the basics in maintaining your health, you don't have to worry about all the "studies" that fiddle around with percentage points around the edges....

I used to do scientific research for a living (actual, wet-lab biochemistry/cell biology/molecular biology), so this topic is somewhat near and dear to me. I retired early in disgust due to the corporatization of academic research that occurred. I watched in dismay as clerks and corporate zipper-lickers were given tenured faculty positions while qualified, honest scientists were struggling to get funding for real problems and couldn't get funded for projects that would show the harm that would be/was being done by many corporate products.

A good friend of mine had his career ruined for pointing out in Science that the rodents chosen to test various chemicals that are routinely released by the corporate sector for xenoestrogen effects were a strain that is one million fold less sensitive to estrogen than wild-type rodents. The chemical industry had worked with the EPA to rig the game so that they could avoid any liability from the harm their products were causing. How dare Jimmy pull back the curtain!

I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but our culture has turned its back on science and our academic scientific community has broken trust with our nation by allowing itself to be corrupted by private money. Of course, it is hard to resist the urge to do Monsanto's bidding when the federal government has dried up the public research funds source. Add in the scientific ignorance of the typical American and we are headed towards what happened to Islam in the 12th century. (For those non-history buffs, from the ninth century to the twelfth century the center of the scientific world was Baghdad. At that point, the leaders of the Muslim faith decided that science was a tool of the devil, much as many our our leaders, religious and otherwise, have seemingly decided, and the Middle East entered the Dark Ages, from which it has not yet emerged.)

For those who claim that common sense is the answer to our problems, I am reminded of a Richard Feynman quote. He said something to the effect that common sense is nothing more than the sum total of our accumulated biases. Let's not forget that common sense would seem to dictate a flat Earth.

Ultimately, it comes down to this:

Who can you trust?