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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

I often chuckle that same people who vehemently defend vaccine safety studies also decry studies that show processed seed oils, glyphosate, aspartame, and hundreds of other molecules or compounds are unsafe over time. That's the beauty of medical studies! Whether they're good or bad, your own biases mean you can simply ignore the ones that don't align with your opinions.

Oh, before I forget! Red meat and saturated fat is terrible for you! Wait, no, it's actually sugar that's evil. Vegetables are great for you! Oh wait, most vegetables contain oxalates and other defense, mechanisms and compounds that are actually bad for you overtime.

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> Red meat and saturated fat is terrible for you!

Red meat is a little bit bad for longevity. The majority of the reported effect is correlative.

> it's actually sugar that's evil.

Sugar is bad but mostly because it's easy to overeat, and obesity is all around terrible for health.

> Vegetables are great for you! Oh wait, most vegetables contain oxalates and other defense, mechanisms and compounds that are actually bad for you

Cooking removes most oxalates (tho vitamins too, to be fair). But the overall effect of oxalates is relatively minor, except in extreme cases.

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Every food source has advantages and disadvantages.

Not being obese is 75% of the health battle.

This is all stated as if it is fact. It sounds believable to me, but how do you (and the rest of us) know that the sources you got this from aren't a part of the junk being called out by the article?

Preponderance of the evidence of multiple studies.

Skepticism is reasonable.

It's pretty easy to ridicule (and therefore feel superior to, nice bonus!) an intellectual opponent if you get to invent their views out of thin air.

The central thesis of this comment is “all medical studies are equal”. They are not.

I dislike "the same people who" comments, but I agree with the sentiment. A lot of us have very little ability to determine the validity of this study over that, but will confidently voice an opinion anyway.

The only way (imo) to stay on firm ground is to acknowledge that someone published a thing saying xyz, and maybe that you are x% convinced by it. Can't get too far out over your skis going that route.

I think you're accidentally telling on yourself here. You're looking at somebody getting a result which is surprising to you but rather than being curious about how they might be on to something you're turning off your brain and assuming they're malfunctioning.

Something being in a category, such as "a study", doesn't tell you much about a thing. If you read multiple studies on vaccine safety critically and reason about them and what experts are saying about them, IMO most functional human being are going to reach the same general conclusion about vaccine safety. If you do the same thing on studies about seed oils or aspartame you're also going to come to the conclusion that they're safe! If you're not reaching these same results it doesn't necessary mean you're the one who is malfunctioning but you should seriously consider it and try again to learn what you might not know.

I've never met one of those people. In general people who decry vaccines (as a norm, not talking about the covid can of worms) tend to fall into the "alternative medicine" bucket and distrust all science studies, and those who trust vaccines tend to also trust other scientific studies...

Hmm -- in usual fashion I haven't read the original post here, but I'm guessing it didn't find that RCT trials that big pharma do are quite as useless as most 'medical studies' generally.

Do you think well-funded RCTs (like those that support vaccine safety) are just as weak as any old observational study?

I've now read it.

But my question to the person saying it's problematic to defend vaccine studies and attack food results is: isn't it possible that you feel the research procedures used in one are superior to those used in another?

For example: vaccine safety study looks at 200,000 people and randomly assigns them to use or not use the vaccine. Coffee/red wine study looks at 30 people and surveys them about how they felt last week after drinking coffee/red wine. Looking at these two, I think it's fair to put more trust in the vaccine study.

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