Effects of acute wild blueberry supplementation on the cognition of children
link.springer.com
link.springer.com
Well below the threshold of common interest. Small effect size on what is effectively a significance fishing expedition.
>Acknowledgements
>We appreciate the support of the Wild Blueberry Association of North America for their provision of the wild blueberry powder used in this study. Further, we thank the South East Doctoral Training Centre and the Wild Blueberry Association for their financial support. This work is part of an ESRC Case funded studentship. We also thank the participants and school staff who accommodated this research.
It can introduce bias though.
I’d guess Big Blueberry in question isn’t much more than a handful of people in an office working for farmers to promote blueberries.
Bias can become quite intentional when the funding of a project depends on finding certain specific results.
I’m generally dismissive of corporate funded science because the biases are built in from the start. Please help me and explain why I should believe otherwise.
Because the funding comes from an interested party there is a risk of bias and thus reduced relevance but not 0. There are lots of biases, who paid for it being maybe not even the worst.
A scientist working on their passion project might be even worse at letting their personal desire for a result to taint the outcome.
I don't think that's exactly true.
According to Wikipedia[1], IKEA is a privately-held combination of for- and not-for-profit entities. It's hard to say exactly what IKEA is, but "nonprofit" is probably too simple of a description to be accurate.
> wild blueberries
I don’t think bilberries (aka ”wild blueberries”), which the association seems to be promoting and this study appears to be about, are farmed anywhere. They’re harvested from forests.
"Wild blueberries" can mean as little as "came from a short bush instead of a tall one".
Note that the table 2 has 16 tests results. Only one of them in "significant". Where "significant" means that if the juice has absolutely no effect, the random noise in the test will cause a fake interesting result only 1/20 of the times (approximately). They have 16 test, so there is a good chance to get a fake interesting result.
In the table they don't include the 120ms and 500ms test in the MANT test, but both are not "significant" anyway. So IIUC there are 18 test (or more) instead of 16.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/882/
They calculated 11 p-values, and got a significant result for two of them under α=0.1. We'd expect that that to happen about half the time if the null hypothesis is true.
(Realistically, they got a significant result on two numbuers that were both derived from the same measurement, which is less compelling than two unrelated ones. But I'm not sure how to model that, so, like any true armchair statistician, I'm going to handle it by ignoring it.)
I also did a hasty power calculation, and estimate that a study of this size could detect an effect as large as the biggest one they reported about half the time.
In summary: If there's no real effect, there's a 50/50 chance of getting a significant p-value out of this experimental design. If there is a real effect, still a 50/50 chance of getting a significant p-value.
Which hypothesis would I pick if I had to guess? Well, I'm sure this is also junk statistics, but the p-values sure look to me like they could have been drawn from a uniform distribution, which is what I would expect them to look like under the null hypothesis. Definitely not what I would expect them to look like under the alternative hypothesis, given that all these tests are trying to measure roughly the same thing.
Not true:
> Pairwise comparisons were used to explore significant effects, and were corrected for type 1 errors using Bonferroni adjustment
That said, I'm still inclined to say that, even given the Bonferroni adjustment, the distribution of results looks more like what I'd expect under the null hypothesis. It's hard to imagine that all these tests they used are uncorrelated.
In the sentence about the Bonferroni adjustment, I don't understand what "pairwise" mean. (I understand the word, I just don't understand how it is applied. They have 12 quite correlated test. In the correction, are they using m=2 or m=12? Are they correcting only the test that have two subtest?)
[1]: "The reign of the p-value is over: what alternative analyses could we employ to fill the power vacuum?" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2019.017...
[2]: "A Litany of Problems With p-values" https://www.fharrell.com/post/pval-litany/
> We appreciate the support of the Wild Blueberry Association of North America for their provision of the wild blueberry powder used in this study. Further, we thank the South East Doctoral Training Centre and the Wild Blueberry Association for their financial support.
Here in Denmark, blueberry (“blåbær”) means Vaccinium myrtillus and is readily available pickled or frozen, whereas the "blueberries" with light flesh (e.g., Vaccinium uliginosum – "mosebølle") are not considered blueberries in the botanical sense.
I believe the term European Blueberry may have been retroactively applied, although the Scots call bilberries blaeberries, so it could be a corruption of that.
Interesting. 'Blae' in Blaeberries seems very close to 'Blå' in Blåbær (Norwegian, Danish), Blåbär (Swedish) which means blueberry; typically found wild in the forest.
"The name “bilberry” appears to have a Scandinavian origin, possibly from as early as 1577, being similar to the Danish word bølle"
Interestingly bilberry seems to be a Northern England thing, southerners call them whortleberries.
Well, apparently also Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish don't have a word "blue berry" (Dutch has now, for the American blueberry). So maybe it's not that universal.
What can I say, they're strange folk down there ;)
To be fair blueberries aren't that blue, and bilberries even less so, it's about as self evident as describing white grapes as white. It's even possible the fruit predates the colour. That's the case for Orange which only became a colour in the 16th Century, and was named after the fruit.
http://www.wild-scotland.org.uk/species/99/blaeberry-also-kn...
Same as lots of people (me included) confuse clementines and mandarins, or refers to "bananas" without in many cases even being aware their are many types... They're "close enough".
Many are grown in my region for many years. Tobacco was also grown here but when the farmers got out of tobacco blueberries were the crop they chose. Blueberries grow in poor sandy soil similar to what tobacco plants liked so the switch was easym
So many blueberries are grown here the US grower Wyman opened a plant.
A few years go another US grower started a highbush farm. I dont think the highbush blueberries are as good as the lowbush. I'm not sure why but I recall hearing a reason. There's also a food science department at the local university (UPEI) here that studies blueberries.
They're generally available fresh in season in at least some areas of Maine and more sporadically elsewhere in New England. They're also available frozen (especially under the Wyman brand) although I don't know how widely outside of the region.
>In this paper, we summarize published data on the penetration of PPs into animal brain and review some hypotheses to explain the biological basis of potentially health-beneficial effects of PPs to the brain. Finally, we highlight promising new approaches, especially those of a hormetic dose-response and gut microbiota-brain interaction, which may allow a better understanding of PPs’ mode of action in animals and humans.
Only in very low concentrations, but there might be enough for an effect. Possible mechanisms are not well understood.
For the MANT, significantly quicker RTs were observed for WBB participants when compared to placebo participants on 120 ms trials, without cost to accuracy. Furthermore, WBB participants showed enhanced verbal memory performance on the AVLT, recalling more words than placebo participants on short delay and memory acquisition measures post-consumption. Despite these significant improvements in cognitive performance, no significant effects were observed for reading measures.
(Emphasis is mine)
According to this table, that's too low for the European Blueberry:
https://www.intechopen.com/books/superfood-and-functional-fo...
(What I am doing with my life? I don't even know what an anthocyanin is)
As for bio effects you can draw a nice graph of anthocyanin yield vs certain mold infections and some molds clearly can't grow in anthocyanins.
The "industry" doesn't have a unified voice so on one hand the "lets market a concentrated extract as a super-bioreactive kinda-like an antibiotic but for mold prevention" is not coordinating with "lets enter the lucrative supplement marketplace which much like patent medicines a century ago promises everything to everyone". And a third group wants to sell the concentrated extract as a totally safe natural organic food coloring.
Needless to say the regulators are freaked out that the same substance is being marketed as both a completely non bio active colorant, a patent medicine supplement of vague goodness, AND as a food color. So there is much legal freakout and in EU you can use blueberry juice as a food colorant or flavoring but not concentrated anthocyanins refined from blueberries as a food coloring, and/or its allowed in the USA I just can't remember.