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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Is Big Blueberry actually big? I'd expect it to be Medium-sized Blueberry at best, though I admit that lacks alliteration.

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Oh yes definitely sarcasm there. There is nothing wrong with funding research that you have a vested interest in, and I don’t expect anyone had any bad intent.

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.

It can introduce worse than bias. My sister got seriously disillusioned about science when she found no beneficial effect of a particular ergonomic chair from a certain manufacturer that apparently funded the research, and then her professor pressured her if she really couldn't find some minor positive effect anyway.

Bias can become quite intentional when the funding of a project depends on finding certain specific results.

It can be morally wrong. What if they found that eating blueberries was linked to a negative and then decided to hide the 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.

Companies should research their own products and be transparent with the result. Paying for external research gets you access to external resources you don’t have to develop yourself, some level of independence and legitimacy, and contributes to everyone’s knowledge.

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 a small non-profit association counts as ”corporate”.

True, but Ikea is also nonprofit so it’s hard to tell these days.

> Ikea is also nonprofit

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA#Corporate_structure

> farmers

> 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.

Whether or not "farmed" is the right word (although it's commonly used), "wild" blueberries are most certainly deliberately grown and harvested in Maine, and I guess Canada.

Indeed. Oxford, Nova Scotia, happens to be the (self-proclaimed?) Wild Blueberry Capital of Canada.

https://town.oxford.ns.ca/

There are a lot of berry species which are blue in the same genus which are very often crossed with one another and marketed however a producer thinks they will sell.

"Wild blueberries" can mean as little as "came from a short bush instead of a tall one".

However, the organization that provided the blueberry powder (WBANA)[1] definitely seems to promote the type of blueberries/bilberries that are smaller, deeper purple, more flavorful and supposedly richer in flavonoids than typical cultivated blueberries.

[1] http://www.wildblueberries.com/

Have you seen the blueberries Chick-fil-A is putting in their fruit cups? Yuge!

But this study is about wild blueberries (aka bilberries) which are much smaller than their cultivated cousins :)

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