Last night I was reading about the Electra “Townie” bike design, an American cruiser modified to provide the convenience of resting the foot flat on the ground while stationary. On a normal correctly adjusted bike it’s tip-toe. But I was doing this because under 220 pounds weight plus backpack, the frame of my Electra Cruiser snapped away where the seat-post is gripped, after several years of good service. In fact, I’m assured that it has a “lifetime guarantee” and will be replaced free, leaving only the cost of paying someone to put every other piece of the bike onto the new frame.

Does that mean I am not fat or that I am not a person?

I also don’t understand how the initial observation is “not unusual”. Isn’t it effectively saying either that they’re burning more calories than they’re eating, or that the measurements or model are seriously flawed?

TBtAM

and here

I’ve also seen a page advertising a dietary supplement as a cancer drug on myspace.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16996880?

After all the Hawthorne Effect generally results in an improvement in productivity which in this case would be more thorough and hence more vigorous cleaning.

e.g. 1) advertising healthy eating and the other factors which would ideally be eliminated – in both environments.
2) pointing out the wonderful safety is in the hotel
3) (to go for the classic Hawthorne observation) taking equal care to explain a wonderous lighting levels initiative.

Soooo…

People’s perceptions of their own state of health are a better prediction of their risk of death than whatever collection of surrogate markers are being used by the study to determine ‘health’. And yet, somehow it’s the people who are wrong, not the markers? I know that when a model fails to match reality, normal practise is for scientists to blame reality, but mostly they manage to be a little less blatant about it.

(And, in passing, I tend to regard any study which uses a lower BMI as a marker for ‘health’ as automatically suspect. Overweight/obese BMI categories are consistently associated with a lower risk of death. I hope that Bad Science knows better than to buy into the trend for aesthetics-based medicine.)

1) Dietary recall is notoriously poor. So much so that unless you have detailed contemporaneous diet logs, dietary recall is essentially worthless. Even contemporaneous diet logs are only reliable if they are kept by somebody *watching* the subject, and not by the subject. If you are not weighing and measuring, you are guessing, and your guess is no better than anyone else’s.

2) Most of the ’studies’ I have read on nutrition would not get a passing grade in a rigorous science course. My favorite along that line was a study (in a peer-reviewed journal, no less) in which the ‘researchers’ removed the sugar from the diet of one group, and concluded from the observed health improvements that animal protein was bad for diabetics. I kid thee not. Modern nutritional education is not far enough removed from religion, and generally suffers from massive confirmation bias.

All of the interesting bits of science start out with, “hmmm… that’s strange…”

Firstly, you were beaten to your hi-fucking-larious point by eyalbd at number 5.

Secondly, it’s pretty clear that Ben meant ‘likely to die during the period studied’.

Perhaps your crusade for accurate writing would be better directed against those who deliberately fudge numbers in order to mislead people and not against the author of a web blog which is, well… on your side.

“Quick pedantic point: isn’t everyone equally likely to die?”

Check comment 13. Wonder what comment 39 will be about.

And no response from the guru about bad use of numbers

Quick pedantic point: isn’t everyone equally likely to die?

I have seen the behavioural pattern below in family and friends:

After doing exercise, many tend to stay off the sugary foods/deserts for fear of undoing the good work of exercise.
But perversely, at times when they feel that they are not getting enough exercise are more likely to indulge perhaps in the belief that their health drive will start the following week.

Convincing workers that they are exercising vigorously is likely to influence self esteem and dietary choices(small changes such as putting less food on the plate might be hard to detect).

The other factor is how it changes the workers’ attitude to their job.
A worker who sees an extra benefit from the job in the form of exercise may ‘work out’ more effectively – modify how they do their job (e.g hoover more vigorously).

And finally, a worker who feels knackered and sore after a shift, instead of feeling achy and in need of a sofa and comfort food, may when informed feel a sense of reward from the aches and take better care of their diet and maybe take other forms of exercise (such as walking to shop rather than taking the car).

I found this article :
http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=20000701-000028&page=1

In which she says that our beliefs about disease, such as breast cancer, can (directly or indirectly) affect our health. But she never says that disease is caused by our belief in it. It looks like fairly standard “Think positive!” advice to me.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505277

To her, this wasn’t an issue as blood diseases don’t really exist. She is generally regarded as a complete crackpot at Harvard.