
Errors Trigger Retraction of Study on Mediterranean Diet's Heart Benefits - sudouser
https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=619619302
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mindfulplay
There is science which involves studying objective, physical things that have
been repeatedly evaluated by independent scientists and proven time and time
again.

And there is this new class of 'science' which is tantamount to p-value
hacking and only slightly better than social engineering.

Coffee cures cancer. Year 2010 Coffee doesn't cure cancer. Year 2011 Black
chocolate prevents heart attacks... And so on

Most of these studies read something like this: 'we asked a hundred people
what they ate for the last month'. I don't even remember what I ate for my
evening snack yesterday.

It's really poorly controlled and definitely not the rigor that goes with
proper science. This should not even be taught in schools let alone treated as
'research'.

~~~
jfim
To be fair though, in this case the results are still the same when correcting
for the methodological errors that happened in the study.

From TFA:

> It turns out approximately 14 percent of the more than 7,400 study
> participants hadn't been assigned randomly to either the Mediterranean diet
> or a low-fat one. When couples joined the study together, both had been
> picked to follow the same diet. At one of the 11 participating study sites,
> the lead investigator had assigned the same diet to an entire village and
> didn't tell the rest of the investigators.

> "This affected only a small part of the trial," says Martínez González. When
> the researchers reanalyzed the data excluding the nonrandomized people, the
> results were the same, he adds.

> Still, because everybody wasn't randomly assigned to different groups, the
> study can no longer claim the diet directly caused those health benefits.
> "We need to tone down the results, but it is just a little bit," he says.

> Many other studies have shown that people eating the Mediterranean diet have
> lower risks of various ailments, without claiming cause and effect.

In this case, since it wasn't fully random, they weakened their claim to
remove the cause-effect link, instead of p hacking as you mentioned.

~~~
sudouser
also from the article, the study author had over a hundred studies retracted
because of poor analysis

------
antman
"The revised paper says only that people eating the Mediterranean diet had
fewer strokes and heart attacks, not, as the original paper claimed, that the
diet was the direct cause of those health benefits."

A typical wording for that sort of research, not really a retraction.

