NIH Courted Alcohol Industry to Fund Study on Benefits of Moderate Drinking
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#drug-company-funding...
My guess is that the best ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, normalized for effort, are getting a couple HEPA filters for your house and getting blackout curtains to improve sleep quality. Diet, exercise, meditation, etc., are obviously more effective, but also require actual effort, whereas with these interventions you just pay the couple hundred bucks and you're done.
Also there are plenty of standalone units that don’t integrate with HVAC. E.g. I have the Winnex 5300-2, which is one of the Amazon recommended units. (Some of the others are designed for smokers, chefs, or other specialized purposes.)
This is exactly why it's difficult to properly control for the supposed moderate drinking that's "healthy". Sooo many ways to explain why "moderate" drinkers are healthier:
1. Maybe they're a self selected group of people who can properly moderate usage of something that's bad in order to get the benefits, in this case, friendships and social activity.
2. Maybe drinking is bad and moderate drinkers know it. Therefore moderate drinkers intentionally moderate their drinking and overcompensate in other miscellaneous healthy activity.
etc etc etc
...
"Sooo many ways to explain why "moderate" drinkers are healthier ..."
I have this silly idea that drinking, which is bad for you, in moderation, actually exercises the processing and filtering mechanisms (liver, kidney, etc.) that are required to deal with it.
Which is to say, imagine you never drank alcohol - how healthy (or "fit") would those mechanisms be ?
I have no idea if there is any validity to this thought but I find the idea to be interesting.
Vanilla extract, meats cooked in alcohol (it does not all burn off), some vinegars, mustard, cooking spray, "non-alcoholic" wine/beer -- they all have marginal amounts of alcohol.
I suspect the basis for your theory is the idea behind inoculation. However, the purpose of the kidney and liver are to serve as filters for toxins. In any other context, filters don't get stronger with use, they degrade with use. The more crap you shove through it, the faster it degrades. How often do you have to change your car's air/fuel filters, or your HVAC filter? How often do you have to change them when you abuse them by living in a dusty climate?
Thus, my own (unqualified) take on it is that these organs can only handle a finite amount of filtration before they simply fail.
The distinction should be between living and nonliving systems. Living systems are frequently designed to strengthen things that are under stress. This is why working out makes you stronger; compressing, even breaking a bone can make it heal stronger. And why we build up tolerances to things. Our biological filters work with specialized proteins, our body can learn to express certain proteins more in response to stress. Perhaps that includes the ones involved in filtering?
What if those relationships actually make you feel more alone?
That doesn't mean we should always expand government; government has other drawbacks. But there are trade-offs that should be considered: some things should be controlled democratically, rather than by the powerful. The purpose of democracy is to distribute that power equally to everyone.
We need an overhaul of the way research is funded, but I don’t think asking everyday individuals to fund is the right way.
My plan right now is to save money, retire early, and then doing whatever research I want that fits my budget. This avoids many of the problems with the current system, but is not possible for many.
This would allow me to pursue more risky research (in the sense that the research may fail to produce useful results) than an assistant professor trying to get tenure could. I also wouldn't have to raise funds, so I could focus on projects I believe are important, not just what can get funded.
In the book "Invention" by Norbert Weiner, as I recall, he suggests that the government could fund independent researchers to encourage better research. I don't think that will happen, so I have a DIY solution instead.
The NBER just released a paper this week on crowdfunding, primarily looking at Experiment's dataset: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24402
The ads of yore about “most doctors prefer Camel” look alien today, yet the “moderate drinking is helpful” stuff is still with us.
Binge drinking needs to stop, though. Besides the obvious health hazards, it's also putting the rest of us — who just enjoy a nice glass of whisky once in a while, or some beer at a concert — in a needlessly bad light.
Drink for the taste, not for the buzz.
Before lead was put into gasoline two health studies were conducted by the government, but the relevant industries (including DuPont) had influence over the research. Both studies found leaded gasoline was totally safe. Low and behold it reduced the IQ of an entire generation around 3 points (best estimate).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
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Obviously alcohol isn't as damning as lead, but if funded research can declare lead safe it seems like it could conclude anything.
I used to think it was corrupt for companies to sponsor research on their own products. Then one day it occurred to me: who else is going to care about a product (especially one that's relatively unknown) more than the company trying to sell it?
Supplements in general are vaguely effective and mostly unpatented, meaning that the only incentive for a supplement company to perform "research" is for the purpose of marketing that they have some sort of research, but it's against the law for them to say that their supplements do anything specific outside the vague "bone health" etc. claims.
Don't get me wrong, I take various supplements daily, but I'm also fully aware of how sketchy this industry is, especially where there are herbal supplements that were out there found not to contain any genetic material of the herbs the bottle was advertising.
If you come up with a supplement to aid in sleeping, it's fine to conduct a study and use it in marketing to say hey, studies have shown it helps you sleep at night.
The matter becomes grayer when there are concerns about the safety of a product. I'm personally willing to trust your study that your supplement aids with sleeping, but I don't trust that you're disclosing that your test subjects also all died of cancer. You have an interest in hiding the downside of your findings to sell more product.
Put another way, the NRA's studies would find nothing wrong with arming every American man, woman and child-- for their own protection! Their interest is in selling guns. That owning a gun increases your chances of accidental death by x% is likely not a fact they will share with you.
I might be wrong but I think this would be illegal
also, Not quite sure what you are suggesting.
> How can a supplement company ever do a study on it's efficacy
> They don't. It's a conflict of interest.
> it's fine to conduct a study and use it in marketing to say hey, studies have shown it helps you sleep at night.
This is why there are clear rules about putting funding sources in the study, and it seems like the NIH violated this deliberately.
It's surprising that I still see studies about the benefits of wine, chocolate, coffee, or basically any other vice as being healthy and life extending.
It's not surprising that these studies are often funded by the industries themselves without mentioning it as a disclosure in the research or in the articles promoting the research.
We've got to find a way to vet studies on their merits regardless or in spite of the conflicts of interest that are funding them.
And to extend that reasoning, the public does. We need to fund these things, which means paying taxes.
I am very leery of medical advice where I know doctors are basically there to prescribe drugs and surgeries when I know from experience I can get better results from diet and lifestyle. But talking about that is a huge shitshow. Most people don't want to hear that.
I don't know how to solve this. The money needs to come from somewhere, but the minute money is involved, no one trusts what you say and it seems to not matter the order in which that association happens. Being a believer in the product because it worked for you and trying to make money on something you believe in makes you one of those MLM people in the minds of a lot of people.
Doctors are not somehow above having a conflict of interest. One cancer doctor* went to prison for his heinous treatment of patients for personal profit, some of whom never actually had cancer.
This isn't some problem unique to me or unique to people who aren't medical professionals. The entire health industry has a problem here.
Also, that's a personal attack and violates HN guidelines.
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/07/10/cancer...
After watching a friend suffer, I feel a visceral negative reaction to peddling dietary supplements alongside medicalish advice.
There is research showing people with my condition who surf have a better prognosis. This research is respected enough it led to the creation of a prescription treatment where people inhale nebulized salt water. I think that's a silly conclusion and a more logical one is that sea salt is beneficial. I also recommend people like me simply go to the beach whenever possible and/or live near the coast because this is known to help.
I'm sorry for your suffering, but the problem here is that people are suffering horribly and dying from my condition and there is no path forward for helping them. Meanwhile, drugs are being developed that cost $300k annually and help only 5 percent of the population but I am evil incarnate and viciously attacked on a regular basis for a. Saying "I did X and it helped me" and b. Trying to find some means -- any means -- to monetize my writing on any subject, whether health related or not, so I can take better care of myself and stop being desperately poor.
I blog. The information is free. It isn't framed as medical advice. And when I criticize conventional medicine and how it gets monetized, I also get attacked for that, a thing that happened just today in a different discussion in HN. There is zero logical consistency here. The thing that is consistent boils down to prejudice.
I have thought a great deal about this problem space and how to monetize it. And I cannot think of a good path forward. Trying to make money off of helping people with their health is just inherently problematic. Period. Whether you decide to become a medical professional or not.
That sounds almost like a false dichotomy. I don’t think any decent doctor would exclude diet and lifestyle in regards to health. And neither should the patient. But I can’t help but wonder how often a patient gives up that kind of information. Does a person suffering from obesity and related symptoms disclose the fact they drink a 2-liter of carbonated sugar water a day? And since diet and lifestyle is not in the doctor’s control, what else can a doctor do? Best to get a referral to a dietician I guess.
And when I began getting better, my doctor was in no way curious. He just scheduled me fewer appointments because I wasn't sick enough to need his time.
Can you elaborate ?
What did they add to the salt that gave it health benefits ?
(genuinely curious)
My body misprocesses salt. A high salt diet is standard medical prescription. I concluded that the additives in table salt are problematic for me, in part because I misprocess some molecules and in part because I consume more salt than average, which means I consume more of the additives as well. I also concluded that misprocessing salt has various knock on effects. When the body sweats out sodium chloride at high rates, it drags other minerals with it. Those micronutrients made a big difference to me.
I no longer need that brand of salt, in part because I live near the coast and get it in the air, in part because I spent years remedying my various deficiencies and I am no longer severely deficient.
There is research that people with my condition who surf have a better prognosis. So my conclusions aren't entirely unsupported by existing research. The medical world used that research to develop a nebulized treatment. Their theory is that surfing helps because you breath salty sea air and it helps the lungs. I used it to conclude that sea salt with a variety of micronutrients made sense for me. I think it is rather silly to conclude that surfing is solely or primarily beneficial because of the air you are breathing. The condition is famous for negatively impacting lung function, but it is genetic and there is a lot more going on than lung issues.
In a nutshell, the medical world recognizes that salt is significant for my condition, but they only think quantity matters. I decided quality mattered more.
“The presentations gave the alcohol industry an opportunity to preview the trial design and vet the investigators. Indeed, the scientist leading the meetings was eventually chosen to head the huge clinical trial.“
Which is unfortunate because “though excessive drinking is harmful and problem drinking is on the rise in the United States, many observational studies have found that moderate drinkers outlive abstainers and have less heart disease.”
I am as against shite science as anybody, but I would decry the reverse happening as well—fear mongering over the fact that, yes, alcohol will probably shorten your life and put you at higher risk for many physiological problems that may outweigh whatever minor benefits it bestows.
I'd wager it's a larger question than all that. But of course I will second that the science-side should be represented honestly.
I can't comment on the States, though. And I understand the concern about the language.
In other words, moderate drinkers may be a self-selecting group for people with good health.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/diet-physical-ac...
Given that the healthcare industry and the alcohol industry are fairly good sources of revenue, does anybody have an argument for why we should really expect a different outcome if this was funded by and influenced by federal government?