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What Can We Learn From The Retraction of the Mediterranean Diet Study? (vox.com)
Remember that landmark 2013 study that found that people on a Mediterranean diet had a 30% lower chance of heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular disease than people on low-fat diets? An anonymous reader quotes Vox:
Last June, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine pulled the original paper from the record, issuing a rare retraction. It also republished a new version [of the PREDIMED study] based on a reanalysis of the data that accounted for the missteps... But after spending several days talking with some of the brightest minds in nutrition research and epidemiology, I now feel the PREDIMED retraction is actually cause for hope -- maybe even a new beginning for the field.
Yes, studies with big flaws pass peer review and make it into high-impact journals, but the record can eventually be corrected because of skeptical researchers questioning things. It's science working as it should, and the PREDIMED takedown is a wonderful example of that. This process should bring us a step closer to what really matters: informing people who want to know how to eat for a healthy life.
Yes, studies with big flaws pass peer review and make it into high-impact journals, but the record can eventually be corrected because of skeptical researchers questioning things. It's science working as it should, and the PREDIMED takedown is a wonderful example of that. This process should bring us a step closer to what really matters: informing people who want to know how to eat for a healthy life.
You should go on systemic reviews published in high impact factor journals.
The reason is that the world is complex. When you look at it, even if your technique is flawless (which it won't be), you will find contradictory evidence. If you look back at landmark studies that have stood the test of time, you will just about always find procedural or analytical flaws that invalidate their conclusions. Note very carefully here: an invalid conclusion is not the same as an *untrue* one.
The moment of scientific discovery has immense romantic appeal, but it's only the start of a long process in which that discovery is repeatedly knocked down and then propped back up again. What a systemic review paper does is go back over the *entire* chain of contradictory findings and sum up the state of the evidence.
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Oil workers in Alaska would do fine on a Mediterranean diet, there's nothing "cutesy" about it. You're a moron who knows nothing about this.