I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss

In essence "science" reporters have made it their business to not understand statistics.

That way they can turn weak correlations into strong causations, rake in the eyeballs, and then go "oops" whenever someone points out problems.

Replication is hard and expensive, particularly in the medical field, and does not get the researcher any real science points.

Besides, it's more fun to do a meta-analysis on a flock of sorta-vaguely-similar studies.

> For me the take away is that non-trivial independent replication of results still stands as the gold standard for experimentation.

Agreed. Too bad funding agencies rarely if ever give you the money to do it :(.

The takeaway here is that statistics is arguably one of the most nuanced quantitative fields out there. It's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot, particularly with p-values.

I think every statistical test has its place, but my personal favorite lambasting of p-value testing is Steiger and Fouladi's 1997 paper on non-centrality interval estimation [1].

As an aside, Steiger was my graduate statistics professor several years ago, and probably the primary reason I know this paper even exists. If you enjoy the harsh treatment of significance testing in the paper, just imagine hearing it straight from the horse's mouth during lecture :).

[1]: http://www.statpower.net/Steiger%20Biblio/Steiger&Fouladi97....

If you need regular access to the scientific literature you have or make an arrangement with an institution. You don't pay per article or issue. It is a real problem for unaffiliated or freelance folks, though.

I'd hope that news outlets covering any kind of science pay for access to at least some major journals as a matter of course. The subscription prices are probably much lower per issue than the price to buy an issue individually.

Most journals also show you abstracts for free, which are overviews of what each paper says. If you find a paper that you want to read in full, email the author - most scientists are very happy to know that people are interested in their work, so they'll give out copies to anyone who asks.

This isn't to defend the paywalls - I think open access is important. But I don't think the paywalls are a valid excuse for journalists.

It is very often possible for journalists to get papers for free. In many cases it's easy to email the author and they'll happily provide you with a copy within short timeframes. Some archives provide free access to journalists, e.g. the cochrane library.

I'm all for open access, because I think everyone should have the right to see publicly funded scientific research. But from my experience as a journalist who's written a number of pieces on scientific works it often isn't a big problem. I never had to pay for a journal article to do my work.

Its a serious problem even in academia. I have had to email authors of papers or go begging on reddit.com/r/scholar more than once, even when I had very expensive university subscriptions available to me.

Imagine how mad the people in the study would be after they found out it was a sham. "I drank curdled milk for 3 weeks so you could get your big break!"

When I read this, I nodded. But now you've got me wondering if I just want to believe you.

I don't think you need to go that far, you just need a PR person with a conscience to spill the beans on what they did (or dissect what others have done).

Of course one can say basic things like "average daily calories should be between 800 and 3000", but even a range that covers 95% of the population isn't right for everyone, and isn't precise enough to really help anyone. Individuals differ not only in terms of lifestyle, which conceivably could be studied, but also in terms of genetics, which no study to date has examined in more than a rudimentary way. The various statistics sins that we complain about on HN are exacerbated when important factors like genetic background are left unstudied. And we haven't even mentioned the fact that most published (and unpublished) nutrition studies are funded by the food and supplement industries!

A rejection of a particularly poor practice of science is not a rejection of science. I doubt we'll see decent nutrition science until we're all equipped with a network of bloodstream nanobots that measures the actual physical response we each display to nutritional input.

I wouldn't have a problem if posters on said bodybuilding forum referred to HN as "the nerds on some programming site". It's the truth, isn't it?

Ah the critical distinction is paying attention to your body is not the same thing as buying a book. As per OPs comment, I used to lift, its good exercise, and I saw plenty of demonstrations of data gathering technique and analysis.

> The thing is that it's a damn hard lifestyle, if one doesn't have the right mindset/(self)education/upbring.

And budget. To do properly requires a pretty good budget for good quality protein sources, vegetables, etc.

> Although that sounds ambiguous, everybody does know what clean food is

Not at all. You project too much. Many people truly believe that healthy food is what the supermarkets & TV tell you is healthy. The popularity of the "NutriBullet" is proof alone - "turn any food into a super food"... Uhh huh.

I disagree. The study was fake because the intent was to deceive. He used flawed methods, but could have used 10 times as sophisticated methods and still would have been able to publish completely invalid results.

He did not find that "journal peer review is non-existent". He targeted a low-quality journal that does not send out papers for review to make sure he could claim that the research was "published" when sending out his press releases. That's explicit in the article, which you might find an interesting read

> that journal peer review is non-existent

This isn't about peer review, because the paper was knowingly submitted only to journals known not to conduct peer review. Quoting from the article:

> We needed to get our study published pronto, but since it was such bad science, we needed to skip peer review altogether. Conveniently, there are lists of fake journal publishers.

And later:

> The new publisher’s CEO, Carlos Vasquez, emailed Johannes to let him know that we had produced an “outstanding manuscript,” and that for just 600 Euros it “could be accepted directly in our premier journal.”

This is really more about science journalism than about science.

These kinds of journals are difficult for a lay person to tell apart from actual, scientific journals, but distinguishing between the two is exactly the kind of job a competent science journalist would do. Inept science journalists, on the other hand, give these fake journals a reason to exist by citing them unchallenged.