Posts Tagged ‘causality’

Soybean oil is the most common cooking oil in the American food supply. By far. If you are consuming a lot of ultra-processed foods, you are consuming a lot of soybean oil. Now, the University of California at Riverside says that a new study links soybean oil to obesity. Specifically, scientists at the university have […]

The claim is both straightforward and absurd. “An additional hour’s walk could add 376.3 min of life expectancy.” This is a near perfect reduction of “Exercise Is Medicine” to absurdity. Yes exercise is an excellent tonic and the benefits of physical activity for health are well documented. As a metaphor, exercise is medicine is not […]

Skimming the headlines, it would be easy to think that the combination of mobile phones and social media are responsible for quite a range of our current ills – including mental health and obesity. If you want to dig deeper, you can find a whole tome on the subject from Jonathan Haidt. He has woven […]

Eight states have moved to provide nutritious meals at school for free to all students. A few simple reasons make it clear enough that this is a good idea. It reduces the stigma attached to receiving free school meals while improving food security for children from low-income families. Furthermore, nutrition quality goes up for all […]

As an article of faith, we like to believe that healthy habits will lead us to a longer life. So of course, it makes sense to develop healthy habits for eating, enjoy an active life, and get enough good sleep every night. But putting a number on the benefit of those habits is not so […]

It’s a popular cause. Red meat production is a problem for the climate. Add that to ethical concerns some people have about consuming meat, and the push to reduce red meat consumption makes total sense. But when people start spinning misleading narratives about observational research and using them to promote this otherwise worthy idea, they’re […]

“Morning workouts turbocharge the benefits of exercise,” says Psychology Today. A litany of headlines like this have been crossing our screen for weeks now. They are insistent. “The early bird gets the worm – and sees better workout results,” said People magazine. “This is the best time of day to work out if you want […]

An “impassioned polemic” is headed our way from British media doctor Chris van Tulleken and it aims to have us excise ultra-processed from our dietary habits. No doubt about it, ultra-processed food wins the prize for today’s best food boogeyman, but how wise is this bit of food fear based on correlation without a cause. […]

Consider these two competing headlines. In the Washington Post, Kate Cohen tells us “It’s time to cancel diet culture.” Then with a press release about new papers in Nature Medicine, researchers tell us “Most new Type 2 diabetes cases attributable to suboptimal diet.” It’s a fascinating mashup of causality, attribution, and diet culture. On one […]

This news just rolled in from the department of DUH at JAMA Network Open. Unwanted weight loss in older persons is a cause for concern. Perhaps some people have sailed through life without seeing a loved one wither when they suffer a devastating illness. But for most of us, this is not a big news […]