drumdude wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2024 5:33 pm
Nutritional and health studies are among the hardest to do correctly and without bias. There’s a huge industry for creating results to advance a product or agenda. The experiments are expensive, time consuming, and rely on the participants adhering to the process. If a study finds something, it’s unlikely a 3rd party will be able to replicate and test it.
I would take the findings from any study with a huge grain of salt…
Supplement studies can definitely be some of the worse to comb through in trying to find what's legitimate and what's garbage. Not sure if it's gotten better at all, but if the only research that was being put out was from somewhere like China, or from one of the "pay-for-outcome" advertising study mills, it was pretty much a guarantee that the findings were rubbish. While there's definitely some issues with funding potentially influencing findings, I think that the two biggest issues are that they usually rely on self-reporting (i.e. study participants self-report on diet/consumption, and there are no controls), and that they rarely account for socioeconomic status. One of the greatest examples of the latter was the research about red wine consumption being healthy. It took at least a decade before researchers started looking a bit deeper on why people (particularly in the US) who drink red wine would have different mortality outcomes than people who didn't.
Forever, red wine was touted as a "healthy alcohol." Now, it's finally come around full circle to where the general consensus is that there is no such thing as a healthy alcohol. Any benefits of compounds within an alcoholic beverage are more than negated by the alcohol itself. They realized that red wine drinkers generally came from higher socioeconomic strata, and had access to preventative medicine, regular doctor visits, etc.
For the most part, research coming out of major universities is generally somewhat insulated from the funding bias issue. Normally in those settings, the study is designed first, and then the proposal is shot-gunned out in search of grants. In other words, the study (and methodologies which could potentially influence outcomes) is designed before funding. Then the grant funding comes from the tax deduction budget allocation of a pharma group, or one of the US's health organizations (NIH, for example). Or at least that's what I've gathered from friends at research unis.