Elmo Stickers, Apples, and the Pain of Retracted Research

We're once again talking about Brian Wasink, the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. They were in the news last year over a retracted study, and he's back again with six more studies retracted. Nutrition research is hard. This is also not great for the public’s perception of science.

Aaron has a book out now! It’s called The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully. You can order a copy now!!!

Any local bookstore you might frequent. You can ask for the book by name or ISBN 978-0544952560

John Green -- Executive Producer
Stan Muller -- Director, Producer
Aaron Carroll -- Writer
Mark Olsen – Graphics
Meredith Danko – Social Media

And the housekeeping:

[DozyBinsh]

Haha, Andrew Gelman has been railing against Wansink for years now, and I'm kinda impressed by how restrained he's been about this on his blog.

[VanBurenOfficial]

Before Time began there was Healthcare triage. We know not where it came from but only that it had the power to analyze studies and expose them to truth. Our children are raised in the blinding righteous light of healthcare triage, who Reigns Down Sweet facts of pure succulent accuracy, and bless us all with the deepest and most profound appreciation for what it means to be truly healthy. Healthcare triage, it is to modern man what the Promethean fire was to early man. Thank you Healthcare triage, thank you for saving the universe.

[MaryQcumberfairy]

Wow. I am a nutrition student and I really wanted to join Dr. Wasink's Food and Brand lab summer research program. I got an email saying they were "revamping" the program and would not be running it this summer. I wonder if this had something to do with the "revamping"...

[jonnycarlo]

15 studies?! That's a lot what would be the implications on other papers

[Marco_Onyxheart]

I've heard of several of these, even incorporated them into my life to some extent. I'm a little shocked.

[rigrentals]

Thank you Dr. Carrol. As a student registered nurse, I find this information fascinating.

[jonathanzapata]

I think Cornell leadership should assume other research currently being conducted suffers the same problems. This was not an isolated incident and should be a case study for all researchers securing funding at Cornell.

[bradjbourgeois]

I went shopping while hungry the other day... I actually spent less than I usually do. Not sure if it was because I was trying to hurry and get out of there so I could eat or because my wife didn't come with me. :-)

[JohnSmith-tdhd]

But when you go shopping when you're hungry, you do tend to make stupid decisions about food. I call them "hungry decisions".

[mojosbigsticks]

There's a guy at my gym who's really nice to fat people.  With no prompting, he'll tell them "it's just calories in, calories out, man!".  If you write him a list of everything you eat for a week, he'll tell you where you're going wrong.  It's so simple!  He can't understand why anyone would choose to be fat.

[jag]

my mom i currently convinced that having 3 tablespoons of chia seeds a day will make her lose weight. Is there any studies that show it does any more than just any other "eat a lot of fiber" plans?

[gravityvertigo]

"Things have gotten worse! This is Healthcare Triage News."

At the risk of catastrophizing, you could just start every episode like that.

[ayarel]

Wow. Now I wonder if there was *any* useful information to glean from any of them...

[niall]

Dr Wansink was hilariously incompetent. I follow a few academics on twitter and Wansink's studies were constantly being scrutinised for having clear mistakes in the numbers. things like numbers not adding up right or reporting mean averages that werent possible. somehow it still passed peer review and the mistakes wouldnt be caught until after the papers had hundreds of citations.

[Overonator]

The p statistical significance analysis needs to go and be replaced with Bayesian analysis. Journals should stop publishing papers with p values and the scientific community would be forced to stop using it.

[playc.holder]

Yeah but some of those just sort of intuitively feel like they’re true, like the small bowls one. Ima be skeptical that ones wrong despite the retractions