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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand your facetious and, frankly, spurious attempt to dismiss this report from Derek Lowe. Lowe has spent decades informing lay audiences about pharmacology and biochemistry. A facile dismissal of his reporting as "not scientific" is not a credible counterargument.

The core finding, which is what you are ultimately trying to find fault with, is this:

   In 1,157 patients volunteers undergoing three-year longitudinal evaluation,
   the patients in the highest quartile of plasma erythritol concentration were
   very strong outliers for CV events. That correlation holds up after
   controlling for all sorts of other dietary and physical variables (weight,
   age, gender, known cardiovascular risk factors, and more). And on top of
   that, the authors demonstrate a surprising but extremely plausible
   explanation for these findings: erythritol, in both in vitro and in vivo
   assays, enhances platelet aggregation.

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> Lowe has spent decades informing lay audiences about pharmacology and biochemistry.

So? Why should I care whether a report is written by David Lowe? This guy has already drawn a conclusion about erythritol despite how inadequate the evidence is for how harmful it is to those without CVD, and is even willing to tease the reader with some data on fruit flies as if that matters. It doesn't matter what his background is; I don't find this article becoming of someone in the field of research.

> A facile dismissal

Yet all you did was cite the fact the article was written by David Lowe and paste an excerpt as if you think I hadn't already read it.

Facetious, because I chose to read beyond that piece of abstract? Because I pointed out that invertebrate physiology is a nonsequitor as to whether a substance is medically relevant to human being? Because I don't agree that correlation of data in a study with inherent confounders can be so easily used to interpret risk in healthy individuals?

There's a difference between correlation and causation, and especially in regards to judging medically relevant risk.

If I was being facile and facetious, I'd be claiming there's no problem with erythritol. That's not what I'm saying at all. There's no good reason people should be consuming artificial sweeteners or sugar. That doesn't mean that there's necessarily a meaningful cardiovascular risk.

Your dismissal is facile because you focused on parts of the report that are a part of the background, but you instead presented as germane to the report's overall credibility.

As one example, you started by dismissing the finding of adverse effect in fruit flies, as if the author was presenting it as being relevant to humans.

In reality, Lowe writes that the fruit fly result is a curiosity. The specific finding from human medicine that he is actually reporting on is far more relevant and concerning.

I posted Lowe's summary of the abstract because you preferred to focus on tangential minutia and ignored what is actually the novel and significant finding here.

I care that the report is by Derek Lowe because he has spent literally years convincing me of his scientific expertise, industry experience, and journalistic bona fides. You have done nothing to show that you have any of these, and your choice of what you focused on makes me think the opposite.

I am typically extremely skeptical of food-related studies generally, but Derek Lowe taking it seriously is enough to make me a bit concerned, too. Derek (not David as the other person said) indeed has a stellar reputation as you say.

I’m not sure after three years of Covid nonsense, I can get on board with any more authority bias.

I could be exactly right about everything. I could not in good faith just believe him because of his name, and even previous work.

In five years, erythritol is still on the market, then maybe he drew the wrong conclusion from the study.

Yep, that was a typo. Thanks for pointing it out. Too bad I can't correct it.

While I have zero opinion (or awareness even) about erythritol, I find the tendency, especially prevalent on IT-focused HN, to deify Lowe as the herald representative of all things life-sciences to be somewhat problematic.

I too have learned lots from reading him. But that doesn't mean I don't take his pronouncements without a grain of salt. He's as subject to his profession's groupthink as anyone is to their own profession's. I co-wrote a paper challenging a consequential assumption he propagated back in 2020. Explainer version:

https://files.theseedsofscience.org/2022/General_antiviral_p... (substack version also online).

I generally expect Lowe to present findings engagingly and as fairly as I can expect to see in the lay press. And that's about it for me.

I literally have a bag of erythritol in my pantry and I am literally eating from it with a spoon. I am eager to see follow-up studies. That said, the fact that the authors found a substantial effect and identified a clear mechanism of action is what makes me pay attention. And I appreciate Derek Lowe bringing it to my layman's attention.

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