January 13, 2021 — Mistakes can be hard to admit. We see vivid examples. Someone makes a grievous error and yet claims their actions were “totally appropriate.” Even though they’re obviously wrong. Likewise, when a journal makes a mistake by publishing a flawed paper, a retraction can be quite difficult. But that’s precisely what Scientific Reports did yesterday. The […]
December 16, 2020 — Right now, if you search Google for COVID vaccine obesity, the top result will be a story from Nature that says the vaccine might not work well for people with obesity. But the truth is quite different. Because yesterday, FDA released data on the Moderna vaccine, and it works quite well, even in people with […]
December 2, 2020 — Let’s call it a flood – an overwhelming flood of information and misinformation about Vitamin D and COVID-19. But the volume is so great that distinguishing truth from fiction can be difficult. Furthermore, our knowledge is incomplete. So we have lots of speculation and relatively fewer solid facts. Meanwhile, researchers continue flooding the zone with […]
November 22, 2020 — This month has brought considerable progress on NASH treatments. Yet it’s hard to know when we will have real progress in medical care for this silent epidemic. Getting FDA to yes on new treatments seems to be a challenge. Nonetheless, we have news of two new studies that suggest promise for new NASH treatments. One […]
November 3, 2020 — Oddly enough, obesity can be a bit of an abstraction. Everybody thinks they know all about it. But in truth, the smartest people who study know how little we know. At the opening of ObesityWeek 2020, though, all that abstract science came face to face with humanity. Perhaps more than we’ve ever seen before, the […]
November 2, 2020 — Lately, we’ve seen two scientific journals promoting idea that people with obesity are intellectually and morally inferior. This is not OK. Smart people come in all sizes. So do honest and dishonest people. These papers might seem innocent on the surface. But they are nothing but exercises in fishing for correlations. Humans have a history […]
November 1, 2020 — This should be quite a week. Of course, we’re talking about ObesityWeek. Yeah, there’s also some sort of election going on. But we’ve hardly noticed. The real action is online with an all new format for an interactive meeting about everything that’s happening on the subject of obesity and health. Here are a few tips […]
September 28, 2020 — Preliminary results from a fascinating study has us wondering. How often is it that Twitter makes research noteworthy? Ricardo Ladeiras-Lopes and colleagues randomized 534 research papers in journals of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) to receive promotion on Twitter or not. In this analysis, Twitter produced a 43 percent bump in citations for articles […]
August 12, 2020 — Remember when haircuts were routine? Today, it seems, they’re a bit more special. The close contact they require makes it so. But new research also tells us that hair clippings from these close encounters can be valuable for dietary research. A team of researchers gathered up hair from barbershops and salons in diverse U.S. locations […]
August 8, 2020 — Correcting errors is such a nuisance. People feel bad about it. Some people simply can’t admit errors, so it can get messy. But errors are inevitable. Thus it’s really important to correct errors when they are discovered. Especially in scientific research. Nonetheless, one journal seems to have a different solution. Nutrients – an open-access nutrition […]
