>...the inaccuracies stemmed primarily from a statistical and reporting/formatting error that led to further inaccuracies.
>The review found that there was no intended deception or evidence of deliberate misconduct, and that the significance of the results and discussion in the article would not change because of the errors.
>However, since the number of errors is too voluminous to be executed by issuing a correction statement, the journal is withdrawing the article and will republish it as a corrected version in a subsequent issue, and will utilize the same DOI as the originally published version of the article. The authors agree with this decision.
> his famous “Bottomless Bowls” study concluded that people will eat soup indefinitely if their supply is constantly replenished.
Huh? That's not what the study concluded.
Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup […] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls.
1. Dishes with the same name are conflated despite being completely different.
2. Many dishes don't have a serving size they simply yield things like "1 cake".
3. The researcher choose a particularly small sample size (18 out of ~4500)
As a cooking enthusiast I find it frustrating that a researcher forces a narrative that home cooked meals are the problem when the reality is that all the fast an processed foods we have today are much more likely the culprit of obesity. We need to be encouraging people to cook for themselves with fresh ingredients and not publishing dubious studies that suggest to do the opposite.
> The researcher choose a particularly small sample size
It wasn't a sample, it was supposedly (but very much not, in fact) the entire universe, that is, the set of recipes that were present across the entire time period from the first to the most recent edition, and thus could be compared across time.
> Wansink also insisted on only comparing recipes that bore identical names in different “Joy” editions, regardless of the accompanying recipes, which sometimes led him to compare two entirely different dishes. He liked to point to gumbo as one of the most egregious calorie gainers, but the recipe from 1936, a clear soup of chicken and sliced vegetables simmered in water, has almost nothing in common with the sausage-studded, roux-thickened chicken variety featured in the 2006 book. “It’s like comparing a Chateaubriand to a whole roast steer,” Heathers said, “and saying they’re both roast beef.”
Presumably this would also exclude many recipes whose names were changed but are basically the same.
It was a sample. Wansink's conclusion wasn't that the Joy Of Cooking got fattier, it was that home cooking got fattier, and Joy of Cooking was a proxy for that. So it was a sample from the larger universe of home cooking.
I'm generally allergic to long-form articles, but this was short and very readable. It introduces the situation and then gets straight into the various problems.
I'm not against longer articles but the first paragraph should do a better job of letting you know where the story is going to help you know if you're going to be interested in it. Some subheadings (there's none) would help you know where you are in the story and let you skip to the part you're interested in.
I mean, the primary audience for these pieces are magazine subscribers, not people scanning the page coming in from link aggregators. Your suggestions might improve the experience for skimmers, but not necessarily for people who want to just read an interesting article.
'Fresh ingredients' are not the problem, slathering everything in oil and butter is. People do that in home-cooking too, because it is the easiest way to make things taste delicious.
It really doesn't matter that your potatoes have been sitting in the fridge for two weeks, or that your steak's been in the freezer for a month, or that heaven forbid, your onions did not magically arrive from a farmer's market to your plate. The problem is that you fried your potatoes in half a cup of butter, and that you're eating steak.
Per-capita butter consumption in the US peaked in 1911, so we've all gotten slimmer since then /s.
More seriously: correlation is not the same as causation, but one of the obvious correlated changes is the increase in consumption of sugary beverages: soft-drinks, fruit juices &c.
What’s interesting is my parents and their parents before them, had multiple slices of white bread+butter and glasses of whole milk with almost every meal. It was cheap and filling. And they were thinner than we were.
I don't know about your parents, but my parents never had any snacks in the house (I grew up in the 70s). We ate at meals. While my father drank milk at meals (and ate butter out of the dish!), I hated the stuff and drank only water. We didn't have anything else in the house. Things like potato chips, etc, were things we ate at birthday parties.
We ate big meals, but we didn't eat anything else. When I see families now, they stock up with super mega sized snack food at Costco and cram it in their minivan (the 2 reasons for having a minivan being to drive soccer teams around and to take your super mega sized snack food home </snark>) When I was a kid, people didn't buy stuff at that scale. Homes were smaller too, as were refrigerators. You just couldn't do that kind of thing easily.
Of course, my excuse for getting fat these days is because I live in Japan and there is nowhere in Japan that isn't walking distance from a convenience store... That and my wife believes that beer has no calories -- a misunderstanding that I'm loathe to correct.
I've got a working theory that the problem isn't necessarily just in how we've changed eating, but in what we do in our free time.
I don't know about your parents, but when I look at what was done for free time when my grandparents(born ~1930s) and my parents (born in the 1950s) did in their free time vs what my friends and I did I can't help but see a significant difference in the time spent active. I'm not just talking about going out to ride a bike/play basketball with my friends, but later in life. When my grandfather went to work, school, and even to a bar he always walked and my father had a similar relationship with mobility during his early to teen years. Of course that changed when they both were old enough to own a car, but for both of them that wasn't until they're late teens.
Combine that with the only entertainment being other places or outside you have a populace who expends significantly more calories every day than my generation (Millenial).
As time progresses I think you might see parents from the earlier generations feeding their kids at the level they were fed as kids not recognizing that little Billy watches youtube for 3 hours after finishing his homework instead of going and playing basketball with Tuk-Tuk leading to a daily calorie surplus. Over time a daily intake of +200 calories can easily add up to a significant amount of weight.
I don't have any data to support this other than my anecdotal story and how I approached weight loss (by decreasing intake and increasing passive/everyday calory burn rate), but I think it'd be a cool thing to see studied.
You're definitely right, but 200 excess calories a day is 74,000 a year which can translate to 21 lbs a year in weight gain. It doesn't take much to get fat over a few years with a calorie surplus like that.
Frankly, I don't think I agree with this, because someone who's cooking with fresh ingredients gets to see, for instance, that they are adding a boggling amount of sugar to their food.
> Who actually adds a mind-boggling amount of sugar to their food when they cook from basic ingredients?
The sugar contents of some of the staples - bread, sauces, etc. - can be shockingly high. A tablespoon of ketchup has more sugar than a chocolate chip cookie.
I suspect plenty of people who say they cook with "fresh ingredients" still use off-the-shelf bread, condiments, etc. They may pick organic, more "artisan" brands, but plenty will have surprising amounts of lurking sugar.
Ketchup isn't really any less fresh than the butter/oil.
There is a big gap between ‘supposed to’ and the real world. Pick up any bottled dressing at a typical grocery store, and sugar or corn syrup will likely be a top ingredient. See the totally unnecessary addition to ranch dressing, for example:
Which is what comparing the sugar content of ketchup and a chocolate chip cookie is. There's less sugar in a cookie than Ketchup, but ~3 times more carbs.
Who the hell fries hash browns in butter? It's liable to burn.
As to your second paragraph, well, here is my point illustrated. Added sugars are probably our biggest problem. Even when it comes to lipids, I don't think most people cooking at home are making Cheesecake Factory-style meals. But my understanding of the latest research is that trying to remove fats from your diet is no longer necessarily recommended.
You can make delicious hash browns with just potatoes, salt, and butter. Yes, you have to keep it from burning, but it's not that hard, you just use a lower temperature. The result is delicious and crisp.
It's not the only way (Honestly, I prefer duck/goose fat if I'm feeling fancy, beef if not), but it's a perfectly acceptable way of making crispy delicious hash browns.
> Hashbrowns. Mashed potatoes. Fried in butter or oil in the former, butter added to make them taste good for the latter.
I have never used a full stick of butter in the making of either of these. For hash I use as little as I need to lubricate the potatoes. For mashed I use about 1 tablespoon per 2.5 pounds of potatoes. Since I have never made 20 pounds at once, I have never used a full stick.
people who cook their own food are at least aware of the amounts of oil/butter/whatever culprit you want to claim (salt? sugar?). when you eat fast food, you have no idea how much of these ingredients you're consuming (usually more than you would have used if you had made a similar meal yourself) and they're often labmade replacements with unclear side effects (for example, during the fat-free craze of the early 00s, a commonly used additive (olestra) ended up causing anal leakage and ended up being illegal in several countries). butter won't do that.
https://nutritionfacts.org has some of the most understandable analyses of published food and nutrition research. Really well done. I use just by searching an ingredient or topic of interest and see whether he's covered it. Then compare with other sources, of course.
He'll often point out the conflicts of interest behind the funding of various studies as well as analyzing them on their face.
There is an obvious vegan bias from anything by Michal Greger. In nutritionfacts.org, it is blatantly obvious cherry picking and editorial bias. For example, he goes through great lengths to show which studies are funded by the various animal product industries when they contradict his viewpoint, but makes no such effort for studies on plant-based foods. He also has a habit of highly weighting small sample or small effect studies that have never been replicated when they agree with his viewpoint, but requiring much higher rigor when contradicting it.
> but makes no such effort for studies on plant-based foods
. . . specifically whole plant-based foods. He describes the health problems of hydrogenated oils, sugar, and products made from them.
Is there a whole plant based food industry funding studies on broccoli and collard greens? If not, is he biased or simply stating what his research implies?
Yes there is. Almost every major class of produce has an industry association (or several) which promote the interests of their industry, including funding research. In fact, a family member of mind sits on the board of two such associations in California, one for peach growers and one for tomato growers, both of which have funded tons of research out of UC Davis.
That isn't to say that the research is flawed, but somehow Greger only sees this funding mechanism to be fundamentally bad when they contradict his predetermined conclusion...he conveniently doesn't see any reason to question a study on kale funded by the kale industry.
And yes, Greger is biased. His opinions start with the premise that vegan==good and anything else is bad, and he works backward from there to shape a view of research that bolsters that premise. It's no different than Mormon scientists attempting to prove that coffee is bad for you, or Muslim scientists that attempt to prove that pork is bad for you. The idea that humans shouldn't eat animals or animal products has a valid philosophical foundation, and while a vegan diet is likely far more healthy than the average diet, editorializing the science to attempt to prove nutritional superiority of that philosophy is irresponsible pseudoscience.
> It's no different than Mormon scientists attempting to prove that coffee is bad for you, or Muslim scientists that attempt to prove that pork is bad for you.
Assuming the proper procedures are observed I don't think I see something wrong in principle with these examples. Certainly if they're massaging the data we're talking about something different.
There is certainly no problem doing a study and having a hypothesis that X is bad. There is a huge problem with going through the literature and selecting studies that agree with your point. Part of the problem lies in the fact that X is usually not completely good nor completely bad.
For example, let's say that 10% of all studies are poorly executed. If there are 100 studies that conclude that X is good, I can find 10 of them that are poorly executed. Let's say there are 20 studies that conclude that X is bad. If 10% of them are poorly executed, then I can find 18 which are well executed. In reality there are 90 good studies concluding that X is good and 18 good studies concluding that X is bad. However, I can show the 10 poor studies showing something is good and the 18 well done studies showing it is bad, leading you to conclude that there is some kind of conspiracy, even though most of the evidence concludes that X is good.
Meta studies are particularly prone to selection bias in this way.
If they're principled about the science and the procedure, sure. The problem with deeply held philosophical or religious beliefs in science is when they start with the conclusion and then contort the process to arrive at that conclusion.
>Assuming the proper procedures are observed I don't think I see something wrong in principle with these examples. Certainly if they're massaging the data we're talking about something different.
Already "trying to probe X" is a bias. And if you have a religious or monetary interest on top, you shouldn't be doing such research in the first place.
Even if you intend to follow all correct procedures, your prior beliefs might still affect your results subconsciously.
Everybody has some kind of bias. Should a scientist be barred from studying greenhouse gas emissions if he is a known advocate of curtailment of fossil fuels? If not, why is that different?
>Should a scientist be barred from studying greenhouse gas emissions if he is a known advocate of curtailment of fossil fuels?
Probably.
>If not, why is that different?
It's not.
(Now, sure, they could do it. In fact, they do do it. It's not like my opinion is law. That said, historically, researchers with some personal bias had all kinds of problems related to that in their research -- many examples).
Clearly we're seeing some real-world issues with the actual practice of science, but the concept is that if researchers are carrying it out properly it doesn't matter what their personal beliefs are. You start out with a hypothesis, design an experiment, and it either proves you right or wrong. I don't think it's necessary or even desirable to start interrogating beliefs and only selecting scientists we somehow judge completely unbiased; if we followed that to extremes we'd end up with a case where the same scientist could not even continue studying the same subject.
>but the concept is that if researchers are carrying it out properly it doesn't matter what their personal beliefs are. You start out with a hypothesis, design an experiment, and it either proves you right or wrong.
Yeah, but note how this presupposes that its equally easy to "carry it out properly" in either case.
Whereas what I say is that
(a) it's less likely for biased researchers to carry their research out properly (I say less likely, not impossible).
(b) so for that, we should try to have less research from biased researchers
(That's because I don't think that "(c) biased researchers should try more to handle their research properly" is an option -- because of how bias works, biased researchers will always be more prone to not handling their research properly).
> (When my parents’ ragged copy of the 1964 edition succumbed to water damage a few years ago, my mother delivered the news as if a relative had died.)
I'm willing to bet my life that the author has taken liberties with this "delivered the news as if a relative had died" part. I bet if there still exist actual record (say an email) of the delivery that it would be something he wouldn't want us to see. It's a small lie, sure, but it's so unpleasant. In an article whose supposed topic is honesty no less.
