Nutrition and health: confusion is served

Cristina Roure

Red and processed meat, so reviled for years in all healthy eating guides, is back to happy days. Recently, the United States Department of Agriculture abolished the initiative promoted by Michelle Obama that proposed the inclusion of fresh fruits and vegetables in school cafeterias. The reason was to defend the freedom of the individual and the educational centres to offer a more nutritious meal following the preferences of the American population.

Bad science, new chapters

Jordi Varela
Editor

In July of last year I commented on a work by Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers that concluded that taking into account methodological shortcomings, unpublished studies and poorly explained ones, the waste of biomedical research could be of the order of 85%. According to these authors, only 15% of what is investigated reaches the clinic in conditions of quality and appropriate communication. A little over a year later, other sources insist that biomedical research, in general terms, does not show signs of recovery and, to make it understandable, I will follow the same scheme that I used in the post I have quoted.

The fallibility of scientists

Nature has echoed the professional debate about the intrinsic quality of scientists’ work, in a dynamics of self-criticism comparable to what is taking place, in similar terms, in the clinical world. Scientists are also fallible, says the article writer and therefore, should enhance the mechanisms of self-criticism, rather than enrol in self-deception.

John Ioannidis, Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford, says scientists should work harder to understand the biases of their human fallibility if they want to overcome the crisis of confidence generated by the poor reproducibility of research results. And to illustrate his words, Ioannidis offers three examples: a) from a selection of one hundred psychology studies, only the results of just over a third of the work could be replicated, b) a group of Amgen researchers only succeeded in reproducing 6 of the results of 53 reference studies in the field of oncology and haematology, and c) the Ioannidis team itself was able to replicate completely only 2 of the 18 gene expression studies based on microarrays (DNA chips).