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"Milk Kills," Study Says and Everyone is Afraid. Is This More Than Fearmongering Bullsh*t? Methodological Issues & Conflicting Evidence Would Suggest the Answer is "No!"

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After reading this article you won't have to be afraid of milk any longer. The editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) will be rubbing his / her hands. The paper by Karl Michaëlsson et al. (2014) that was published earlier this week, made it to the mainstream news in the US and Europe and did - at least at first sight - reflect well on his or her magazine. "The British Medical Journal saves you from intoxicating yourself with milk!" - That's great, right? Well, in today's SuppVersity article, I am going to take a closer look at how "great" it actually is that studies like this hit the mainstream media, while less exciting, because beneficial studies on milk are not being mentioned at all ... unless, of course, it's the morally superior and allegedly healthier soy milk we are talking about *sarcastic laughter* You can learn more about dairy at the SuppVersity Dairy Has Branched-Chain Fatty Acids! Is There Sth. Like a Dairy Weight ...
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The Obesity Paradox, a Fat White Lie: A Longer Life for the Obese Is Nothing But a Sick Exception to the Healthy Rule

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"But Dr. the TV guy said, I would live longer than my normal weight cousin." I guess, you will be familiar with the therm "obesity paradox". A term coined by researchers and picked up by the media to sooth the increasingly overweight majority of the US citizens to believe that even if they cross the border to obesity (which more and more people do), they can still live a healthy  and - assuming that they follow all the good expert panel advice and take their expensive meds, even outlive their normal-weight peers. Now, a recent paper from the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences at the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York basically states: "There is no such thing as an obesity paradox" In fact the only paradox there is, is the ease with which scientists around the world have been fooled by numerous reports of a lower mortality risk for obese individuals than for normalweight individuals within the past decades (I guess that...
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Meat-Ology: A Brief Glance at the Latest Data on The Link Between Red Meat, Cooking Techniques & Prostate Cancer

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Image 1: The mass media is already sharpening its knives - finally some sensational headlines on the negative side effects of red meat! But is your prostate really at risk? Should you already tell your urologist to sharpen his surgical knife and schedule your operation? I have compiled the data for you, now it's up to you to decide. I guess most of you will have noticed the upheaval around the latest egg-bashing study by Spence et al. that made the rounds a couple of days ago. In view of (1) the authors' outright statement that their intention was to go against the hazardous disregard for the potential dangers of cholesterol laden eggs that was spreading so rapidly (sounds more like pamphlet than like a study, right?), (2) the fact the authors present data with standard deviations that are larger than the actual differences in carotid plaque areas between the different quantiles of weekly egg intake and (3) the superior (lower total and LDL and higher HDL) cholesterol level...
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Increasing Adolescent Obesity Among Girls: How School Stress is the New Scapegoat When the Skinny Fat Phenomenon and Twinkie Diets Really are to Blame.

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Image 1: Was it school stress that cost Michelle Obama her famous "guns" (=muscular upper arms)? Probably not - and despite contrary conclusions in the study at hand, I doubt that it is school stress that leaves our daughters fat, but undermuscled. What do you say? According to the results of a recent evaluation of the data from the European HELENA trial, school, or rather the stress your children are exposed to within the educational system, may be one of the reasons for the increasing number of obese adolescents (age 12-18 years) - at least if we trust the statistical finesse of Tineke De Vriendt, Els Clays and 10 other scientists who recently published a paper on European adolescents’ level of perceived stress and its relationship with body adiposity in the European Journal of Public Health ( DeVriendt. 2011 ). The study was part of the Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence cross-sectional study (HELENA-CSS) , the aim of which is to obtain "reli...
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EPIC Study Says: Vegetables, Fish, Dairy, Pasta & Rice Reduce, Softdrinks, Processed Meat, Margarine, Spirits and Potatoes Increase Waist Circumference - Really!?

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Image 1: The EPIC project unites scientists from all over Europe ( EPIC, IARC. 2011 ) I don't know whether it is a good idea, for an anti-epidemiologist like me (I mean, come on, epidemiology vs. controlled experiments is like astrology vs. astronomy) to post this, but a 13-year (1992-2005) meta-analysis ( Romaguera. 2011 ) of data from 48,631 men and women from 5 countries participating in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study is probably as good as as epidemiology can ever get and with scientists from 12 different institutes all over Europe, there is at least some hope that the results of their investigation into the association of food groups/items consumption "on prospective annual changes in 'waist circumference for a given BMI' (WC BMI ), prox for abdominal adiposity". Unfortunately the first of the typical shortcomings of EPIC studies (pun intended) like this becomes obvious in the previous citation, already...
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Is Most of Our Science False? A Radio Lesson (12PM EST) on Biases, False Positives and Reading Between the Lines of Scientific Studies

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Just in case you got nothing else to do: Tune in live and listen to me @ Carl Lenore's Super Human Radio to learn whether or not Mr Ioannidis from the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston is right and ... Most Published Research Findings Are False!? Update: Episode steht zum Download bereit! Listen live to SHR @ 12:00PM ET For those interested in the original study , here is the link . Ah, and don't worry! I will try my best to make it more palatable ;-) Update: Episode steht zum Download bereit!
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