Scientist Aims Bazooka at Barrel of Fish
Monday, March 11, 2019
Physician-Scientist John Ioannidis, whom I have mentioned here from time to time, has become interested in the field of nutrition. Having been trained as a scientist and having to fight really hard (and often losing) not to ridicule anything I hear about nutrition, I welcome this development. This is good news, even if only in the "naming a problem is half the battle" sense:
Dr. Ioannidis blames residual confounding and selective reporting. Confounding means incorrectly concluding that A causes B when, in reality, some other factor X causes B. The trouble for researchers is when A and X are related to each other. Teasing out the true cause can be quite difficult. For instance, eating bacon very well may be associated with a shorter lifespan. But maybe bacon-eaters are also less likely to exercise, and lack of exercise (the confounding factor) is the actual cause of a shorter lifespan.The good news is that these problems are in long need of discussion. The bad news may be that nobody, including Ioannidis himself -- I am not familiar enough with his work to know one way or the other -- is discussing how government funding or other influence over so much of science is contributing to the problem.
Residual confounding refers to the undeniable fact that we can't know if confounding is present if we don't even bother to measure confounders in the first place. (And, to complicate matters, it may not even be possible to measure some potential confounders, such as how a person's lifestyle might change over time, what his genetic background is, or the exact chemical composition of the thousands of different foods in the marketplace.)
Selective reporting means that any study which shows a link between bacon and early death is likelier to be published than one that doesn't show a link. Combined, Dr. Ioannidis believes that residual confounding and selective reporting have created a systemic bias in nutrition research. [link omitted]
But again, identifying these problems is a very important and valuable first step towards fixing them.
-- CAV
Updates
Today: Corrected typos.
4 comments:
Hi Gus,
The question is, of course, does subjecting fish to the bazooka method turn them into 'processed food' and thereby make them unhealthy for human consumption?
Inquiring minds want to know!
c andrew
I don't know -- but I wouldn't expect to any time soon, either!
Residual confounding and selective reporting. The first of those is why experimental science is the strongest method we know to gain knowledge. Unlike historians and climate scientists, we can control the variables. We still tend to publish positive results more than negative ones though. They're more fun.
True, but controlling variables is especially difficult in the field of nutrition, and probably anything else where human behavior can influence an outcome.
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