Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims

It's not often I share journal articles without comment here anymore, but I just wanted to share this with my readers.

Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims  from Nature.

Paleo Science and the Paleo Diet II

Have a listen to just 30 seconds of Robb Wolf, Diplomat Extraordinaire for Paleo™ from his recent podcast on the Christina Warinner Debunking Paleo video ... transcript here.  

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Alan Aragon, highly respected author of the popular and informative Alan Aragon's Research Review, spoke recently at a conference of the National Strength and Conditioning Association, NSCA. They recently put the slides from his presentation online HERE. 

Please do expend some "skull sweat" as Robb calls it to inform yourself of the full content of Alan's presentation.  Do especially take note of slide 53 which summarizes the paleo studies (some of which) Robb makes frequent reference to (and most of which I've discussed here).  Also take note that 

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A Matter of Control

Bump.

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Original Publication 12/10/2011

It seems to me that many people misinterpret -- at least in their minds -- the meaning of this word when it is used in the scientific context.   While most of those no doubt understand the concept, after hearing the term enough, it just seems it comes to mean something else to them after a while.  I submit as evidence, statements made by two popular bloggers.  

First up, J. Stanton at gnolls.org with How “Heart-Healthy Whole Grains” Make Us Fat.   Wait!!  Did you click that link already?  I forgot to caution you that the post you are about to read contains science, so you might want to proceed with caution.  < / sarcasm > .  Anyway, the study he discusses in that post is:  High Glycemic Index Foods, Overeating, and Obesity.  Stanton prefaces his discussion with the following:

Yes, I admit to a degree of hyperbole—but this study is so well instrumented and controlled, and its results so informative, that I believe it’s important for everyone to read it.

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Quotations: Taubes on Pathological Science

INTERVIEWER Marc Hellerstein thought that the obesity epidemic was caused by people being sedentary?

TAUBES He believed that the key is whether you’re sedentary compared to how you used to be. When I told him about the Pima and the Sioux Indians and this 1981 study of obesity in oil field workers, he had an excuse for everything. So the Pima and the Sioux Indians, they lived on reservations, so they could be obese because they were relatively sedentary, at least more sedentary than they used to be. And the oil field workers, well, they're Mexican-American, so they have some kind of "thrifty" gene going. You know this is what pathological science is: a field in which you can find a reason to explain away all negative evidence. In pathological science, it’s no longer possible to refute the hypothesis. Remember, science is about trying to test your hypothesis and refute it, but in a field like this, if you test it and come up with a counter-example, the counter-example is just explained away with whatever comes to mind. Negative evidence never means anything. So you have an obese person who's sedentary, that's proof of my hypothesis. If you have an obese person who's very active — at least, compared to most people today — the Sioux Indians, for instance, who were so poor they had to walk down to the river to get their drinking water; who had no televisions, no cars; they had to walk outside to evacuate their bowels — those people are obese because they used to be more active than they are now.

~ Gary Taubes, January 2008

Interview with Seth Roberts 

Leaving aside Gary's example here, and focusing on his discussion of science, I contend that low carb "science" has long since passed into the realm of the pathological.

Looking AHEAD to a day when Intent to Treat is a thing of the past ...

... it's not a competition, the compliant/successful are analyzed separately, and while we're at it, perhaps we can do away with this notion that any single outcome or cluster of outcomes is somehow more important because we've designated them as "primary" ahead of time.

Such is where I find my thoughts wandering as the Look AHEAD diabetes trial passes in and out of my head as I absorb the discussions of it here and about the web.  

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NuSI Again: A Bar Too High, Occam's Razor and Rabbit Holes

I weighed in with some initial thoughts on Gary Taubes and Peter Attia's new venture NuSI here.  Yeah, I'm going all wet blanket on this deal, but for good reasons grounded in reality in my opinion.  I'll leave it to all the others to get all excited about this venture and all the "real science" we'll see come from it.   As Gary says of NuSI:

Its purpose is to facilitate and fund rigorous, well-controlled experiments targeted at resolving unambiguously many of the outstanding nutrition controversies — to answer the question definitively of what constitutes a healthy diet.

A bar too high?

What would constitute a rigorous, well-controlled experiment?  Well, as I pointed out in my last post, the biggest "knocks" the NuSI gang make on existing research are not really with experimental design per se, but rather with practical limitations in doing human clinical trials.  These are:

1. The inherent lack of compliance control in free-living studies.
2. The monetary and logistics obstacles inherent in metabolic ward studies resulting in studies that  of necessity involve smaller sample sizes and/or shorter durations than might be desired.

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NuSI, NuSI ... What to make of NuSI

Boy Wonder Attia has called off his
war on insulin, but his character lives on

Well Gary Taubes and Peter Attia -- or, if there was ever a time to refer to them by their superhero Asylum names, Fatman and Glucagon  -- have launched their project, NuSI, the Nutritional Science Initiative.

Finally!  Some real proper science will get done, free from the stranglehold of bias inherent in the evil entanglements of government and industry -- oh, and idiot scientists operating with suboptimal intelligence..  

Why any scientist would even apply for a grant from an organization headed by a man with such disdain for them is really beyond me, but ...

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Bad What?: Science? -- Reporting? -- Blogging/Sharing?

Confession time.  I found out about that recent LC v. LF diet study from Andreas Eenfeldt's blog.  Andreas seems woefully misguided into thinking that obese Americans got that way listening to US Government guidelines and eating a low fat diet.  Any and every study that shows some advantage for LC is rapidly added to his list demonstrating that LCHF is superior and LF diets are nothing short of criminal at this point.  I'll have some personal things to say about all of this at the end of the post.  Gossip Mongers can skip to there if you like ;-) (scroll down to line, or browser search on "And so now")

In any case, in a blog post entitled New Study: High Fat Food is Good for Diabetics, Andreas cites this "news" article:  High-fat diet lowered blood sugar and improved blood lipids in diabetics.  Another low carb advocate, Dr. Eades, also tweeted the following:  RCT shows better glycemic control & improved lipid labs seen in diabetics on #lowcarb as compared to lowfat diets.  The tweet links to this report:  Questioning Carbohydrate Restriction in Diabetes Management.

Now this was an RCT = Randomized Controlled Trial.  The type of study generally considered to be the gold standard of trials, but we've discussed here before how not all RCT's are created equal, and as serendipity would have it, Andreas was one I called out in:  A Matter of Control.  In his short blog post, Andreas calls the current study at hand "a new high-quality Swedish study".  Does the study itself deserve that label?  After looking at it more closely the past few days, no.  If for no other reason, because the study participants didn't report eating the diets as prescribed.  The intended control is also limited to caloric intake.  I contend that when one is comparing diets of different macronutrient composition, one of the three must be controlled for -- e.g. held constant -- varying the other two, or the results will forever be tainted.  

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Science Krispies: Junk, Pseudo and Pop!

In light of recent events, I thought I'd do a little bump fest.  My apologies to my regulars.  I will be putting out new material very soon.

Original post date:  9/29/11

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Oh CarbSane, why must you constantly criticize my favorite guru?  After all:

• He/she helped me lose XX lbs
• He/she is right about ABC & LMNOP
• He/she is just trying to get the studies done
• He/she saved my life!
• He/she has helped me finally understand why I'm fat
• He/she cured my XYZ
• The mainstream is wrong, we need more like him/her, don't discourage them
• Ad Hominem!!!!
• etc. etc.

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The Science Code

From Matt Metzgar

Scientific habits of mind, or the scientific process, can be succinctly summarized as the use of evidence and reason to arrive at conclusions. This sounds simple but it’s a demanding code: Take nothing for granted, form conclusions on the basis of careful observation and honest thinking, and be willing to modify those conclusions in the light of new experience.

Art Hobson, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Arkansas

I copied this here because I think this is a far better description of what science is, or should be, than the black swanning meme I keep hearing.  By that I mean I get pretty tired of hearing the various versions of the "a good scientist tries to disprove their hypothesis" nonsense.  Any research scientists in my audience believe that?  This is why I've said all along that there was never a need for an alternate hypothesis to explain the obesity epidemic, and further that the alternate hypothesis put forth anyway was never formulated based on observations.  Hobson continues:

In other words: Trust the universe, rather than tradition, emotion, authority figures, ancient texts, or popular vote. It’s a code that has worked surprisingly well for science. It might be science’s most important benefit.

I really like this part because it even takes a poke at so-called conventional wisdom.  However many seem to have taken countering conventional wisdom for countering's sake to the level of Olympic sport.   The "popular vote" rings true with me and can be seen in the comments sections of most posts by the likes of Eades circa 2008-2009.  I don't think I need bother with the appeal to authority, only to point out the double standard with which this activity is often engaged in.  Speaking of authority figures, however, the anti-establishmentarianism (is that a word?) rampant in the greater community continues to astound me.  Lastly his admonishment of trusting emotion is quite fitting.  Many seem to have way too much emotion invested when analyzing or discussing the science.  How you feel about a study, or how the results of a study make you feel, should have no bearing on your consideration of the evidence as presented.  In this regard, the whole n=1 thing is useful to finding what works for you, useful to share so that others might try it and it might work for them too, but totally irrelevant -- especially when unverified -- to discussions of science.

Live Blogging from the Paleo Summit VII: Mat Lalonde (rocks)

Link:  Mat Lalonde
Title:  An Organic Chemist’s Perspective on Paleo?

Ratings:     ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼     just go watch/listen!!

 

 

OK folks ... I've got me a new sci-crush!  This guy is saying what I've been saying for a long time now -- if you're gonna make claims about something, you better have the stuff to back it up.  Mat, there is no problem with your delivery man, don't change.  Your detractors are obviously those "doth protesting too much" who know they've just been called out without being named.

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Of Mice & Men: My Rodent Study Disclaimer

The purpose of this post is to have a sort-of "disclaimer" to link to (if I can remember) whenever I discuss a rodent study here at the Asylum ... A small manifesto if you will, on my feelings on the utility and limitations of rodent studies in relation to human beings.   Also, I look at this post as a way to remind older readers and/or inform newer readers as to my background.  I spent roughly five years in the company of countless rats and mice, working for Big Pharma, and when I speak of rats, I'm not talking about my colleagues ;-)  My job was half analytical chemistry, half metabolism.  I worked on mostly discovery level drug candidates (a level before development) characterizing the absorption, metabolism and routes of excretion of these drugs, mostly antidepressants.  As such I've chopped the heads off of more rats than I care to recollect, opened up countless abdomens of mice to get maximum blood samples from the vena cava, removed/homogenized and analyzed countless livers, brains and intestines, observed behavior of these animals in their cages when dosed with the drugs I was giving them, etc.etc.etc.   As such, I do take somewhat personal affront to those who issue blanket dismissals of any animal studies.  As far as I'm concerned you're all a bunch of hypocrits unless you have never taken anything more than an aspirin and/or never intend to and plan to die a "natural death" feeling full pain and discomfort from whatever might befall you on this journey we call life.  I'm not going to turn this into a defense of Big Pharma, I have no affiliation, and since the days when I worked there (late 80's) I've felt our country is vastly over-medicated (and it has only gotten so so much worse since).  But I mention this because I believe my perspective is a bit unique in this regard.

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Quotes to Live By?

The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.

~ Atle Selberg

Three guesses where this comes from and the first two don't count!

Random(ized) Thoughts on Replication and Control

I had started this post as a follow-up to my A Matter of Control post before Chris Masterjohn posted the following over on his Daily Lipid blog:  When Standing At the Brink of the Abyss, Staring Into the Great Unknown, We Randomize.  

I think Chris highlights some of the reasons why randomization is important in studies, but in my opinion, he does overreach some as to the power and purpose of randomization. I'll address those concerns towards the end of this post.  Still, his post is spot on regarding two of the important reasons why randomizing is important in studies:

1. Selection (self or assigned by investigator) bias, and 
2. Unknown confounders

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Scientist Bashing I ~ The only sport approved by your favorite VLC guru?

This started as a comment over on Stephan's blog, but started getting a bit long.  So I hope Stephan won't mind too much if I move it over here.   Plus it contains thoughts about various and sundry names in the LC webosphere with whom I've had brief exchanges.  Those exchanged have had these thoughts brewing for quite some time, but in the end it seems to go back to the ultimate arrogant anti-scientist supreme:  One Mr. Gary Taubes. 

When I first read Taubes, I got the impression that he had little understanding of how science really works.  That first impression has been confirmed many times over in the intervening years.  I have always wondered over why medical schools and such would bring in a science journalist to lecture medical students on such a topic.  If one doesn't have a PhD in the exact field these days it is difficult to teach at the college level at all for example.  Gary has a bachelors in physics, with no apparent experience as a "scientist".  Apparently he practically lived in a lab for a while, and I guess this is where he believes he amassed the knowledge to view researchers critically and offer up his sage advice on how they ought to be doing their jobs.  Given his influence in certain circles, I think he's responsible for the wave of scientist bashing replete with a warped understanding of what science actually is and how it's done.  

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Obesity: Meal by Meal, Year by Year! (Hypothesis v. Hypothesis?)

Listening to Gary Taubes' recent interview, I found this song popping into my head from Godspell.

and this one

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