Beware of research data
/Be aware of what you read.
We have had many people over the years criticize some of the articles we put up….“hey, the N on this study is 6 ! That isn’t a reliable study” etc.
As we have said many times, you can pick apart many studies. Few are comprehensive, many just look at a small piece, and as our link today eludes to, some are frauds and listed from “pay-for-play” publications. Some however are just so flawed that publication should never have occurred.
However, just because you have a problem with an article does necessarily mean to throw the baby out with the bath water. Good or bad, most valid articles have something good or bad to learn from. Sometimes they spark ideas in our minds, sometime they encourage thought, change or avoidance. This is the value of a valid journal article to us, the bigger picture, not because the study only looked at one aspect of a theory or hypothesis.
Here is an article that is raising Cane in the nutrition world and it sort of highlights some problems.
“Bohannon, a science journalist who also has a Ph.D., lays out how he carried out an elaborate hoax to expose just how easily bad nutrition science gets disseminated in the mainstream media. "You have to know how to read a scientific paper — and actually bother to do it,” he writes. For starters, as Bohannon explains in great detail, the study design itself was flawed — it had too few subjects, and the research measured too many factors, making it likelier that some random factor would appear to have statistical significance.
