Comments on: Aspartame is bad – oops, never mind!

By: bunsen68

bunsen68 — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:35:08 +0000

Definitely the bendy-straws. Wednesdays may also be a culprit. Interaction between bendy-straws and Wednesdays, p < .05.

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 13:55:52 +0000

Maybe the issue is drinking it out of a glass? Or the can? Or using a bendy-straw? Or because it’s Wednesday?!?

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By: pedrinhadeazucar

pedrinhadeazucar — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 06:43:46 +0000

Yeap ! Ironically.
Just to underline the authors’ lack of scientific spirit. If aspartame and sugar sweetened sodas equally are associated ( no possible inference on causation) with some harm, logically they should think about something else.
But no, they have aspartame entrenched as the (media friendly) culprit so they try and prove their point.
A real scientist will build a hypothesis, then try and DISPROVE it. Failing to do so supports said hypothesis.

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:58:53 +0000

Bubbles? Really?

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By: Pedrinha

Pedrinha — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:28:26 +0000

“Dr. Eva Schernhammer and her team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to look through the records of more than 77,000 women and 47,000 men in their nurses and health professional’s studies. They concluded that those who drink a daily diet soda sweetened with aspartame could have an increased risk of leukemia, lymphoma or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

Why the heck didn’t they suspect the bubbles ?
Bad bad science, bad bad peer reviewing.
But a paper published in the pocket !

It’s the bubbles, idiot !

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By: bunsen68

bunsen68 — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:03:42 +0000

Ooh, that’s fun! I had stumbled on Oransky’s Embargo Watch, but didn’t know about Retraction Watch. I’m a recovering academic, and I watch retractions with a heavy heart. They are still pretty rare; I think rates of fraud and plagiarism have gone up in part because journals and readers have much better tools for detecting it.

I agree with you that scientists should be more forthright in their assessments of others’ work — civilized, but honest. Science is supposed to be a self-correcting process. And it is, most of the time. Self-corrections might happen more quickly if scientists were less nervous about criticizing others’ work. But the incentives often work against this: Everyone in a field eventually reviews everyone else’s work (exaggeration, but roughly true), and no one wants to get into hot water with potential reviewers of their journal articles or grants.

Thanks for the pointer to Oransky’s other blog!

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:48:50 +0000

Good point, Ed. Perhaps professional courtesy keeps other academics from slamming “bad science” when it hits them right in the face? I congratulate Dr. Nissen on his honesty. But “bad science” affects the rep of all scientists. They are precisely the ones who should be screaming blue murder at “research” like this instead of merely a wimpy “blahblahblah” (as we translate corporate-speak in the PR field!) BTW, if you want to become even more semi-obsessed, go visit Ivan Oransky’s Retraction Watch site. All they do there is list the latest in published journal articles that have since been retracted due to plagiarism, faked peer reviews, flawed research, scientific misconduct, etc etc. It’s enough to make you cynical . . .

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By: bunsen68

bunsen68 — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:36:49 +0000

One other thing on this topic (which has semi-obsessed me, both for the science and the reporting). Nissen was much less charitable elsewhere, it turns out. See this piece from WHDH in Boston, where Brigham and Women’s is located:

Two quotes:
“The study itself is not done well, the findings are not reliable.”

And:
“We are in the position of promoting public health and so we put out bad science, we’re actually harming the public’s understanding of what they need to know and that’s not a responsible thing to do.”

“Bad science”! That’s not a phrase you hear researchers use very often when talking about the work of other researchers.

FWIW, I’m not sure I’d go that far. But it’s noteworthy that reporters couldn’t find any outside experts who would say good things about the study. Not the usual, “This is a remarkable study,” or “This is an important finding.”

–Ed

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 03:13:02 +0000

Thanks for that NPR link and the important clarification i.e. that the journal ‘pushed back’ to make sure that the ‘chance’ comment was included.

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By: bunsen68

bunsen68 — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 02:51:19 +0000

I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but it’s worth noting that the reviewers didn’t *read* the sentences about chance that you quote; they effectively *wrote* them for the authors of the article, as a condition of publication. See the NPR piece. I’m not sure which is more head-scratching: that the authors might have submitted and resubmitted a paper with findings they knew to be weak, or that they didn’t realize this. Surely it’s the former: They had to pick up some kind of clue from the 6 previous rejections.

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By: Carolyn Thomas

Carolyn Thomas — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 06:06:22 +0000

Agreed. It’s yet another tiresome example of how “sensational” headlines sometimes originate from the least likely sources, e.g. not just The National Enquirer . . .

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