Various web links related to health issues.
Some stories declared good news about the popular supplements ...
But others reported the opposite: fish oil and vitamin D actually don’t protect against those major diseases ...
So why did some news organizations proclaim otherwise?
...
The answer may lie with a
news release
issued by Brigham and Women’s Hospital,
where the trial was conducted.
The release focused on a handful of secondary findings,
which aren’t the primary questions researchers set out to answer.
...
As we’ve written, such secondary findings need to be reported
cautiously. They do not have the same statistical authority as
primary findings, and are more likely to be due to chance. It’s
been stated that secondary findings should only be used to help
interpret the primary result of a trial or to suggest avenues of
further research.
Yet the news release featured those rosy-sounding secondary findings at the top, with wording that made them sound like proven benefits:
PS. Unfortunately because of funding issues the great web site HealthNewsReview.org where this article appears will cease daily publication of new content at the end of 2018.
The study found that vitamin D supplements did little to help fractures, falls and bone density.
The team concluded that vitamin D does not prevent fractures or falls, or have a meaningful effect on bone mineral density, concluding that there is little justification in taking them to "maintain or improve musculoskeletal health," adding that there is no need for more trials to explore this.
But the research also concludes the supplement is helpful in preventing rare conditions such as rickets and osteomalacia in high risk groups, which can occur after a prolonged lack of exposure to sunshine, resulting in deficiency.
Also see my related previous posting about Vitamin D.How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.
In a new book, Unsavory Truth, Marion Nestle - a nutrition
researcher at New York University, writer, and longtime crusader
on conflicts of interest in food science - charts dozens
of fascinating examples like this, from the likes of Hershey
and Coca-Cola, to the Corn Refiners Association and the Royal
Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Inc. Through her investigation into how
money flows from companies and trade groups to labs, she shows
how pervasive the problem is - and why it's distorting how
we think about health.
...
Food companies don't want to fund studies that won't
help them sell products. So I consider this kind of research
marketing, not science. People who do the studies say the conduct
of their science is fine, and it well may be. But research on
where the bias comes in says the real problem is in the design
of the research question - the way the question gets asked -
and the interpretation of results. That's where the influence
tends to show up.
Ottawa physician shocked to learn he could pay site to hide bad ratings.
RateMDs offers doctors two special plans to enhance their presence on the site. The "Promoted" package costs $179 US per month and includes banner ads that will appear on competing doctor's pages.
And for $359 US per month the doctor can buy the "Promoted plus" option. Both packages allow doctors to hide up to three unfavourable comments - a feature called "Ratings Manager."
But if a doctor stops paying, those unfavourable ratings will reappear.
...
Forman's company (GlowingMDs) advertises its service to doctors with the
line: "Reclaim your reputation."
For a monthly fee of $229 plus HST the company provides a ratings template
that doctors offer to patients to complete after an appointment.
"We then take all of those reviews, good or bad, from the doctor,
and we then post it to RateMDs in effect on the doctor's behalf."
According to a study published in the journal Molecules, researchers found that six common artificial sweeteners approved by the Food and Drug Administration and 10 sport supplements that contained them were found to be toxic to the digestive gut microbes of mice.
Over the course of the 15-year study on added sugar and heart disease, participants who took in 25% or more of their daily calories as sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those whose diets included less than 10% added sugar. Overall, the odds of dying from heart disease rose in tandem with the percentage of sugar in the diet-and that was true regardless of a person's age, sex, physical activity level, and body-mass index (a measure of weight).
"We found there was no discernible benefit of aspirin on prolonging
independent, healthy life for the elderly," says Anne Murray,
a geriatrician and epidemiologist at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis,
who helped lead the study.
...
There is still strong evidence that a daily baby aspirin can reduce
the risk that many people who have already suffered a heart attack
or stroke will suffer another attack.
The gold standard of scientific studies is to make a single hypothesis, gather data to test it, and analyze the results to see if it holds up. By Wansink's own admission in the blog post, that's not what happened in his lab.
Instead, when his first hypothesis didn't bear out, Wansink wrote
that he used the same data to test other hypotheses. "He just
kept analyzing those datasets over and over and over again, and
he instructed others to do so as well, until he found something,"
van der Zee says.
...
Large datasets can be prone to p-hacking, Althouse says.
"Let's say you flip a coin a million times. At some point you're
going to get 10 heads in a row." That does not mean the coin
is weighted, even though looking at that sliver of data makes
a random result look like it's not due to chance.
Our "gut instinct" may be more literal than we thought, with memories of where the best food is found potentially mediated by signals from our gut to the hippocampus
Inside our gastrointestinal tract lies a massive mesh of neurons
often referred to as our "second brain." While this neuronal control
system primarily works to independently manage our digestive system,
it also has been found to directly communicate with the brain via
a long nerve, called the vagus nerve.
...
The researchers hypothesize that this mechanism evolved to help
us remember where we found particularly good sources of food, and
aided in navigating back to those specific locations. This is the
first time scientists have revealed such a novel, and explicit,
connection between gut signals, the vagus nerve, and hippocampus
memory activity.