Seth's Blog

• The town that gave up medicine (proposed TV show)
• weirdexperiments.com
• A physicist looks at drug-efficacy data
• microbial self-observation

Thanks to Brian Lim.

You have probably read hundreds of recommendations to eat more polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which in practice means omega-6 and omega-3. If you shop at Whole Foods, you may see Udo’s Blend, a blend of PUFAs which includes both omega-3 and omega-6, as if someone isn’t getting enough omega-6. It is unquestionable that omega-3 is beneficial but there is plenty of evidence that omega-6 is harmful, starting with the Israeli Paradox. Why are they lumped together?

A just-published paper in the British Journal of Nutrition makes several new points about the relation of PUFAs and heart disease. Its main point is a new look at experiments in which one group was given more PUFAs than another group.  Those experiments — there are only about eight — can be divided into two groups: (a) experiments in which the treated group was given both omega-3 and omega-6 and (b) experiments in which the treated group was given only omega-6. The two groups of experiments seem to have different results. In the “both” experiments the treated group seems to benefit; in the “only omega-6″ experiments, the treated group seems to be worse off. Suggesting that omega-3 and omega-6 have different effects on heart disease. They have been lumped together because experiments have lumped them together (varied both at the same time).
Experiments that try to measure the effect of PUFAs usually say they are replacing saturated fats. More PUFAs, less butter. The paper points out that studies of the effect of PUFAs have at least sometimes confounded reduction in saturated fats with reduction in trans fats. Benefits of the change may be due to the reduction in trans fats, not the reduction in saturate fats.

The paper also makes several good points about the Finnish study, a classic in the fat/heart disease literature. Supposedly the Finnish study showed that PUFAs (replacing saturated fats) reduce heart disease. It had hundreds of subjects but they were not randomized separately. The subjects were divided by hospital. Everyone in one hospital got one diet, everyone in a second hospital got a different diet. This meant it was easy for there to be confoundings (i.e., the treatment wasn’t the only difference between the groups). Indeed, there were big differences in consumption of a certain dangerous medication and margarine between hospitals. (Margarine is high in trans fats.)

Perhaps the first author, Christopher Ramsden, who works at NIH, is responsible for the high quality of this paper.
Thanks to Susan Allport.

A few posts ago I commented on Jonah Lehrer’s article about replication difficulties, which Lehrer called the decline effect. I concluded it was an indication how poorly science (truth-seeking) and profession (making a living) fit together. Scientists are always under pressure to do what’s good for their career rather than find and report the truth.

Journalism is another kind of truth-seeking. It has the same problem. Journalists are always under pressure to do what’s good for their career rather than find and report the truth. In an essay about unauthorized biographies, Kitty Kelley makes this point:

[Michael] Hastings said that reporters like [Lara] Logan do not report negative stories about their subjects in order to assure continued access. No reporter would admit to tilting a story toward favorable coverage to keep entrée, but they do, and that is one of the dirty little secrets of journalism today.

Just as no reporter admits this, I have never heard a scientist admit it, with two exceptions: 1. The inventor of the aquatic ape theory of human evolution (Alister Hardy) said he stopped talking about it to avoid hurting his career. It fell to a non-scientist (Elaine Morgan) to develop it. 2. In that famous graduation speech, Richard Feynman pointed out how the first determination of the charge on an electron used the wrong value for the viscosity of air and later determinations, which did not involve that viscosity, tended to confirm the mistaken value. Unfortunately, Feynman went on to say: “We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.” As if human nature had changed.

I conclude that both science and journalism will work best with systems where amateurs and professionals both have substantial power. Kelley doesn’t mention that authorized biographers have important truth-seeking advantages over non-authorized ones (e.g., access to old letters).

The stench was too great. I learned from this article that Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff, once one of the most respected psychiatry professors in America, has moved from Emory University (where he badly deceived university officials) to the University of Miami. The article tells of more Nemeroff dishonesty: He put his name on a textbook he didn’t write. This letter shows how the book was written. The words in the book came from a company named Scientific Therapeutics Information, whose fee was paid by GlaxoSmithKline. Scientific Therapeutics won’t answer questions about what it did. Nemeroff says he and his co-author “conceptualized this book, wrote the original outline and worked on all of the content.” Worked on, huh? Leslie Iversen, an Oxford professor of pharmacology, may have “worked on” the passages he plagiarized (a few words were changed) harder than Nemeroff and his co-author “worked on” their book. The New York Times added a correction to the article worthy of Wittgenstein: “While documents show that SmithKline (now known as GlaxoSmithKline) hired a writing company for the book, they do not indicate that the [writing] company wrote the book.”

In twenty years perhaps Nemeroff will forget that he “wrote” this book, just as the first President Bush forgot about a book he “wrote”.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

A Chinese friend of mine thought I had removed this post.