How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

Re:How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US by AstralStorm on Friday May 04, 2018 @01:51PM (#16996618)

Observational studies can be post- interventional and in this case can prove or not a hypothesis that a certain widespread intervention was successful.

This is very rare and hard to run, so more direct interventional short term studies are used more often.

Suppose a certain country believed an observational study pointing that eating more than certain amount of sugar is harmful (suppose backed by other evidence). They instated hard tax and limit on sugar in foods as an intervention. After some time a big observational study is ran and it is assessed if the intervention brought results.

This is precisely what observational studies (follow up) should do. Not really try to find hypotheses - these need more direct evidence.

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Re:How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US by toasterlovin on Friday May 04, 2018 @03:39PM (#16997560)

Yeah, but if there is an intervention, then it is not purely an observational study. The big problem with nutrition science is that most of the long term studies are purely observational. There is no intervention at all. All they are measuring is how certain observed measurements correlate (or not) with other observed measurements. These are the types of studies I'm talking about.

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