Maybe a sort of interesting study but it's observational and full of speculative mechanistic fluff, and I don't think it controls well enough. We're kinda past the point of egg studies, just study the mechanisms speculated on in an intervention study, right?
it's not necessarily the case that it's junk science, but it is absolutely beyond the capabilities of a normal person or persons to winnow out the chaff.
Your logic is, "nothing's perfect so everything is equally good (or bad)".
Which is not true in this case.
For better and sometimes worse, the process through which medical drugs and procedures come to market, including studies and trials, is heavily regulated.
The Egg Board, however, is free to choose whichever studies to fund they prefer, and will gravitate to ones likely to show the positive effects of eggs and avoid ones likely to show the opposite.
The content of the paper may be entirely legitimate, but it still actually tells us nothing about whether we should eat more eggs or not.
And that's a problem. The best case scenario is it biases published results for things that benefit the sponsors. But there is certainly some amount of fraud including fabricated data, misinterpreted or exaggerated conclusions, suppressed research that isn't what the sponsor wants, etc.
They didn't fund the health study, they funded this paper to point out the positive data in the study.
There's two way to bias independent research through funding. The most nefarious is to fund a whole bunch of research, and only publish the favored results. By ignoring enough failed attempts, it's even possible to get false-positive successes, through random chance. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/)
The second way is to only fund research that is likely to be favorable. E.g. if you sell vitamin supplements, you only fund research on people with bad diets, but not people who eat healthy diets that likely aren't affected by supplements.
In this case, it's leaning so far into the latter, that it's just pointing out positive research that someone else found.
Maybe a sort of interesting study but it's observational and full of speculative mechanistic fluff, and I don't think it controls well enough. We're kinda past the point of egg studies, just study the mechanisms speculated on in an intervention study, right?
> ...adjusting for other dietary factors, demographic variables, lifestyle behaviors, and comorbidities.
They give the data for the specific factors. What is the missing variable which explains their result?
Daily hours of sunlight? Average number of sudoku completions per day?
Full title:
Egg Intake and the Incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease in the Adventist Health Study-2 Cohort Linked with Medicare Data
Via StudyFinds:
Eating Eggs Regularly May Significantly Slash Alzheimer’s Risk
https://studyfinds.com/eating-eggs-regularly-may-significant...
Caveat:
> Funding [...] The analyses in this study were supported by an investigator-initiated grant from the American Egg Board. [...]
That's all I need to see to stop reading the study. Sponsored science is just noise.
it's not necessarily the case that it's junk science, but it is absolutely beyond the capabilities of a normal person or persons to winnow out the chaff.
Virtually all the drugs you take, interventions, cancer treatments, etc. are based on such science.
Almost everything we have in modern medicine is.
This whole position is nonsense. The paper stands on its own.
Your logic is, "nothing's perfect so everything is equally good (or bad)".
Which is not true in this case.
For better and sometimes worse, the process through which medical drugs and procedures come to market, including studies and trials, is heavily regulated.
The Egg Board, however, is free to choose whichever studies to fund they prefer, and will gravitate to ones likely to show the positive effects of eggs and avoid ones likely to show the opposite.
The content of the paper may be entirely legitimate, but it still actually tells us nothing about whether we should eat more eggs or not.
And that's a problem. The best case scenario is it biases published results for things that benefit the sponsors. But there is certainly some amount of fraud including fabricated data, misinterpreted or exaggerated conclusions, suppressed research that isn't what the sponsor wants, etc.
>Virtually all the drugs you take, interventions, cancer treatments, etc. are based on such science.
So it's 'science' done wrong. The implications are that most drugs are useless if not outright harmful.
They didn't fund the health study, they funded this paper to point out the positive data in the study.
There's two way to bias independent research through funding. The most nefarious is to fund a whole bunch of research, and only publish the favored results. By ignoring enough failed attempts, it's even possible to get false-positive successes, through random chance. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/)
The second way is to only fund research that is likely to be favorable. E.g. if you sell vitamin supplements, you only fund research on people with bad diets, but not people who eat healthy diets that likely aren't affected by supplements.
In this case, it's leaning so far into the latter, that it's just pointing out positive research that someone else found.
LMAO, good catch. And I was about to look into it further!
Off topic: is it just me or did Cloudflare‘s human check become incredibly slow?
Slow and ubiquitous. Cloudflare is apparently 90% of the sites I browse...
And AdBlock Plus interferes with it, so I have to pause blocking to even see the human check dealio.