Tuesday, January 17, 2012

We Just Kept Looking and Looking for a Connection That was NOT There

Interesting.  No systematic connection between junk food and obesity.

These researchers sat on the result for two years, trying to torture the data to make it come out "right."

Nod to the Blonde.
at

5 comments:

  1. alutko11:34 AM, January 17, 2012

    Why were they trying to find a weight correlation? Kids have fast metabolisms - they don't gain that much weight regardless of what they eat. They should measure the health of the children to find a correlation.

    I'm not saying we should ban vending machines. A lot of households don't know what a good diet looks like anyway, so even if you banned it at school, kids would still be eating junk at home and bringing junk food from home to school. I just think the researchers are looking for the wrong conclusion.

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  2. Christoph7:48 PM, January 17, 2012

    Also, I can see a huge endogeneity problem here. Maybe schools with many overweight children are more likely to remove snack vending machines.

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  3. Anonymous7:30 AM, January 18, 2012

    Both of the above statements may be true if this were the first study to reach this conclusion. It is not.

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  4. JD Cross8:01 AM, January 18, 2012

    I think your first sentence of analysis is wrong. The study found no link between junk food availability in schools and obesity. The study did NOT find no link between junk food an obesity (nor it did look for such a link).

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  5. Anonymous12:05 PM, January 18, 2012

    The study found no link between junk food availability in schools and obesity. The study did NOT find no link between junk food an obesity (nor it did look for such a link)."

    Exactly this.

    Mungo is seldom unwilling to misstate evidence to support ideological positions. (e.g., "Half of Americans pay no taxes")

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