Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Just 10 Days

Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by dekhn on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @11:20AM (#10458524)

This article has all the hallmarks of poor science: 1) very small study size 2) very short study period 3) self reported consumption 4) marginal p-values 5) highly biased first author.

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by hindenburg on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @03:16PM (#10460386)

I completely agree. I'm surprised that the HN community, which so often points out poor science in other articles, in this case seems to include a lot of people posting personal anecdotes about their diets.

For those people, I think it's very nice that you had a good experience dieting. Your story isn't science however, and the rest of us aren't going to learn anything generalizable from it. Perhaps you should be posting to a reddit support group?

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by dekhn on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @05:14PM (#10461188)

Did you mean to reply to another comment? I didn't say anything about dieting.

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by ibejoeb on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @12:54PM (#10459300)

I'm curious what the consensus is around Lustig and his work. He seems to have impeccable credentials in medicine and nutrition. He seems forthright with the science, but I don't have the requisite biochemistry skills to evaluate it myself.

I'm don't know if he's biased or just right. I'm happy to hear a refutation of his arguments.

For those unfamiliar, here's the talk the probably gave rise his noteriety: https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM. It's long, but it's interesting.

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by pointeroffact on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @05:09PM (#10461150)

the extremely poor quality of this study and the irresponsible PR campaign that has accompanied it is enough reason not to take him seriously.

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by thrownaway2424 on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @11:42AM (#10458703)

Agreed on 1-4 but you lost me at #5. Explain?

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by dekhn on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @12:17PM (#10459001)

You should always consider the bias of the author of a paper when evaluating it. THe author has a vested interest in seeing an outcome. Many authors permit their bias to allow themselves to overanalyze a poorly designed study. Lustig has a history of doing this, for example he published papers previously where the evidence led to a different conclusion; in particular, he selectively analyzed his data to support his conclusion, but direct analysis showed the opposite.

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by awolf on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @12:39PM (#10459196)

>for example he published papers previously where the evidence led to a different conclusion

I did not know this. Could you share the papers you're talking about?

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Re:Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Ju... by dekhn on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @01:46PM (#10459765)

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

read the paper carefully.

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