Industry pushes sugary products, while obfuscating the health hazards

No, it doesn't.

> You really only have to spend time with them to know this.

I don't agree with this event at the level of subjective impression (and I've spent quite a bit of time with kids, with and without sugar), but even if I did, Experience often provides subjective impressions that don't hold up to close examination.

Let's look at some of that "real data" being talked about here:

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Pediatrics. 1991 Nov;88(5):960-6.

"Effects of sugar on aggressive and inattentive behavior in children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and normal children:

17 subjects with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity compared with 9 age-matched control subjects"

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Seriously, if that's all we've got for "real data" on this subject that's just bullshit, and really old bullshit too.

Since that study was published the amount of sugar consumed per day has increased close to 30%. Do you think if they increased the amount of sugar they gave those kids by 30% in would have affected the results?

That's what we're dealing with today, everyday, and most every kid.

I have far more personal clinical experience than those who conducted that study done 27 years ago, both in the number of children observed and the total hours spent observing them, and it's far more up to date.

I've also spoken with dozens of mothers who've confirmed those observations during this past decade alone, and the previous two as well, and none of us had any outside influences motivating us like those who take corporate funding to study just a handful of kids for a few weeks at most.

I'll say the same thing I told those Physicians who denied there was such a thing as postpartum psychosis back in 1985, "you don't know shit about this".

It wasn't until "Andrea Yates" that the connection was made on that. Between the time I pointed it out and 2001 they all didn't do a damned thing to learn more, and they ignored everyone like me who tried to enlighten them.

That is what is happening here, right now.

Read the damned article linked above and do some follow up on it. This is a serious problem, and kids getting hyperactive is not the most serious aspect of it. It's way worse than that.

People drink soda unhealthily not because they've been tricked by Coca Cola misinformation campaigns into thinking that soda is healthy.

Your view is that people think soda is healthy.

To describe the idea is to refute it. Ask a few soda drinkers if they think soda is healthy.

A bias doesn't mean you're being paid -- a bias just means you have a preconceived view on a topic (or are primed to have a certain view on a topic based on your other personal views).

Being paid in order to present a particular view (as though it was your own) is called corruption, not bias.

> and the sample size is at least several times larger than the study I linked to above

Both sample sizes are tiny. The study you linked to above (in my view) isn't good science -- it would've been trivial to find more children to take part in the study (and thus a small sample size seems quite fishy). But ~40 mothers also isn't a large enough sample size.

> As far as mother's saying that vaccines triggered autism in their children, I won't leap to deny there's a link. This is not an issue I've looked into much so I don't have an opinion to offer

I will -- there is absolutely no link. This has been shown by hundreds of studies, and the only available counter-evidence is a study from the 1998 which was written by a doctor (Andrew Wakefield) that later lost his medical license because his study was fraudulent. There is no link, and I would recommend not wasting any energy being open-minded about the prospect.

The reason autism rates in children have increased is because we now classify more people as autistic and have a greater understanding of high-functioning autism (since our understanding of autism has improved in the past few decades).

> my experience is that it's wise to listen to mothers who have experience and those in the health care industry have a very long history of ignoring them when they should have been listening.

Mothers are incredibly risk-averse when it comes to their childrens' safety -- this is obviously understandable and important (it's an aspect of our evolutionary biology). But being incredibly risk-averse can also make you incredibly susceptible to fearmongering (which the prevalence of homeschooling and concerning decrease in vaccinations have proven).

I understand the appeal of "mother's intuition", but it really isn't conclusive enough to make decisions about child health (other than the mother's own children). And let's not forget that mothers don't all agree on everything -- so which mothers should be trusted on which topics? This is why you need objective trials (and I agree that the trial you linked above isn't good -- the need for trials isn't invalidated if the current trails are bad or inconclusive).

I don't think "tu quoque" is a civil way of having a discussion. I didn't use bias as a slur, I was trying to help you argue better (and I explained why you or the mothers you talked to might have a bias -- and it wasn't because you "didn't agree with the status quo"). You appear to be using it as a slur towards me (in a way, saying "tu quoque"), for no real reason.

> Well, I've heard too many stories about mom's taking their children to get vaccinated and describing the effects as "It's like the very next day or two their lights just went out".

And this is exactly the reason why studies are better than anecdotal evidence. There are countless studies by many independent sources that show beyond any reasonable doubt that vaccines are an unmitigated good (one of the greatest medical marvels in history, alongside penicillin or the understanding of germ theory). But that's apparently not sufficient because some mothers of autistic children think that it was vaccines that caused their child's condition.

You know what can really make your child's "lights go out"? Dying. That's what whooping cough, measles, rubella, retrovirus, polio, and any other number of diseases did to countless children before we started vaccinating them. I think that pretending that autism (which is incredibly likely to not be caused by vaccines) is much worse than death (which we _know_ can be a direct outcome of many serious childhood illnesses) is a quite unethical viewpoint.

> that alone provides more than enough reason to avoid concrete statements like "there is absolutely no link" and doing so is most certainly proof of bias.

Would you say that belief in evolution or climate change or gravity is a proof of bias? My view is based on the overwhelming scientific evidence, where studies were carried out in response to a bunch of baseless fearmongering that has without a doubt directly killed children.

You're right that we can't know anything, but entertaining an incredibly improbable outcome (that all of those studies were wrong) and allowing it to affect your life (and the life of your children) is just playing to the fearmongers. It's like saying that you can technically win the lottery -- you can technically win, but the likelihood is so low that you shouldn't base any of your life decisions on that fact.

If there was a study tomorrow that showed that there was a concrete link, and it was good science, then I would accept it and would happily eat crow. But the likelihood is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth entertaining the idea in a normal conversation.