New study disavows marshmallow test’s predictive powers

Re:New study disavows marshmallow test’s predictive powers by yboris on Monday February 21, 2022 @04:43PM (#30421017)

I think your distrust in nutrition studies might stem from the fact there are nefarious entities publishing things. Various industries have a financial interest in making it look like their product, because it contains substance X, is beneficial to people. So they can design the most flimsy experiment with no pre-registration, and re-run it numerous times until they get the result they want.

Lots of conclusions from nutrition studies (especially meta analyses) are robust and useful to follow.

Consider the NutritionFacts website as a good starting point: a non-profit which has no ads, no industry "partners", etc - focused on distilling well-designed studies to see what everyday people can use from them.

https://nutritionfacts.org/

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Re:New study disavows marshmallow test’s predictive powers by gumby on Monday February 21, 2022 @05:24PM (#30421495)

I was not even considering the issue of bad actors. Simply that longitudinal, multi-variate studies of sufficient scale are essentially impossible to conduct.

Even though nutrition is one of the very oldest, and perhaps the very oldest, fields of human study, it still remains in the “butterfly collecting” phase of development as a science. It’s very very hard. I’m glad some people try.

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