There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#2This shouldn't surprise anyone...
People need to realize that research publications are not textbooks. They are communications to other researchers about the way that the evidence is pointing, that helps them design new experiments, that justifies expensive and spendy clinical trials, which eventually find conclusive evidence.
The idea that one can open a science journal and find interpretable truth revealed is a pernicious one. Trust that the data is true, but do not trust the models or the conclusions. Everything is in flux, and it's science because we likely don't know what the real world is like yet.
History will go back and pick out the key experiments and construct a path of discovery, but in real time almost nobody knows what the most important experiments truly are.
This makes for difficult journalism, but one should remain true to the physical world rather than the narratives that are easy to squeeze into 500 word news blurbs.
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#3This shouldn't surprise anyone... People need to realize that research publications are not textbooks. They are communications to other researchers about the way that the evidence is pointing, that helps them design new experiments, that justifies expensive and spendy clinical trials, which eventually find conclusive evidence. The idea that one can open a science journal and find interpretable truth revealed is a per…
This is all true, but the atricle says something quite different than what you are commenting on. The "original findings" which are being reversed were based on 4,000 pieces of peer-reviewed research.
After reviewing more than 4,000 studies, the [1997] authors were persuaded that green vegetables helped ward off lung and stomach cancer.
It's easy to dismiss a single instance as an arbitrary data point. When you can dismiss a large portfolio of such points--you have another problem. That problem is a core-weakness in methodology/approach/and institutional incentives. That seems to be the larger issue highlighted here.
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#4This shouldn't surprise anyone... People need to realize that research publications are not textbooks. They are communications to other researchers about the way that the evidence is pointing, that helps them design new experiments, that justifies expensive and spendy clinical trials, which eventually find conclusive evidence. The idea that one can open a science journal and find interpretable truth revealed is a per…
This is all true, but the atricle says something quite different than what you are commenting on. The "original findings" which are being reversed were based on 4,000 pieces of peer-reviewed research. After reviewing more than 4,000 studies, the [1997] authors were persuaded that green vegetables helped ward off lung and stomach cancer. It's easy to dismiss a single instance as an arbitrary data point. When you can d…
Well, the sentence immediately preceding that one gets it right:
>The situation seemed very different in 1997, when the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research published a report, thick as a phone book, concluding that diets loaded with fruits and vegetables might reduce the overall incidence of cancer by more than 20 percent.
With "might" being the most important word there. These 4,000 studies were all retrospective analyses, and retrospective analyses only find conclusions of the "might" sort, which is well understood by the scientists, but not so well communicated by journalists.
Still, a 20% "might" is a an absolutely enormous amount of potential upside in cancer prevention, even a "maybe" of this magnitude justifies great excitement. Which is why they embarked on the prospective study, which is the real story here.
It is absolutely ridiculous to conclude that there are methodology or misaligned institutional incentives based on this case, it's exactly how things should work. It's just another example of scientists being blamed by bad reporting that they have no control over.
That said, there are many other cases where methodology is wrong or institutional incentives are wrong.
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#5Well, there's this: http://www.clinicalepigeneticsjournal.com/content/3/1/3#B1
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#6Off to the right there's a picture of a bathroom scale. When you click on it it opens up to ... a larger picture of a bathroom scale. I don't know why I found that so funny but I laughed for a good solid minute.
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#7Cancer is like a random process. When enough mutated cells gets into a certain neighborhood of events which lead to cancer, that's how it starts.
When I went to Aruba with my friend, a sailor there told us that most sailors eventually got melanoma from being out allthe time. That's what made me realize this.
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#8I thought it was sugar that makes your body acidic and that causes cancer...
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#9Cancer is like a random process. When enough mutated cells gets into a certain neighborhood of events which lead to cancer, that's how it starts. When I went to Aruba with my friend, a sailor there told us that most sailors eventually got melanoma from being out allthe time. That's what made me realize this.
Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it
#10I don't understand what's being reported on here.
"The reason for the change was more thorough epidemiology. The earlier studies tended to be "retrospective," relying on people to remember dietary details from the distant past."
So what? Which are the studies that are invalid? If none of them are invalid, then why disregard any information they might give us? 4000 studies with similar observations is not "scant evidence", unless you can rule out every single one. And are these 4000 the only studies which have similar conclusions? Probably not.
"These results were often upended by "prospective" protocols, in which the health of large populations was followed in real time."
I don't know what this means.