OMG! A healthy lifestyle means you'll live a healthier life!
I'm perusing Drudge today (as one does) and see this headline:
Secret of healthy aging discovered in 35-year study...
Eat well, work out and never smoke...
Well. NO SHIT.
So I click through to the article in the Guardian and find that they asked 2500 men to volunteer for this thing back in 1979...
and 25 of them actually stuck with it.
So. On the basis of a 1% participation rate, we have a headline screaming at us that a healthy lifestyle *gasp* makes you healthier! And they proceed to draw all kinds of conclusions from these 25 dudes who ate healthy, exercised, didn't smoke, and drank in moderation. Nevermind that a self-selecting "study" like this (which picked guys from a single moderately-sized village) is hardly scientific or comprehensive, or the fact that the rest of us realize that this is, you know, common friggin' sense. NO. We need a 40-year university study to tell us what we already know!
[quote] Dementia expert Professor John Gallacher of Cardiff University said: "The Caerphilly Study has made a tremendous contribution to UK Science."
...no. No, it really hasn't. Good grief. It's made a tremendous contribution to your pocketbook, no doubt (who paid for this study? The article, mysteriously, fails to mention this), but this isn't "science" in any meaningful sense of the term.
I weep for my planet when "news" and "science" like this passes muster.
Secret of healthy aging discovered in 35-year study...
Eat well, work out and never smoke...
Well. NO SHIT.
So I click through to the article in the Guardian and find that they asked 2500 men to volunteer for this thing back in 1979...
and 25 of them actually stuck with it.
So. On the basis of a 1% participation rate, we have a headline screaming at us that a healthy lifestyle *gasp* makes you healthier! And they proceed to draw all kinds of conclusions from these 25 dudes who ate healthy, exercised, didn't smoke, and drank in moderation. Nevermind that a self-selecting "study" like this (which picked guys from a single moderately-sized village) is hardly scientific or comprehensive, or the fact that the rest of us realize that this is, you know, common friggin' sense. NO. We need a 40-year university study to tell us what we already know!
[quote] Dementia expert Professor John Gallacher of Cardiff University said: "The Caerphilly Study has made a tremendous contribution to UK Science."
...no. No, it really hasn't. Good grief. It's made a tremendous contribution to your pocketbook, no doubt (who paid for this study? The article, mysteriously, fails to mention this), but this isn't "science" in any meaningful sense of the term.
I weep for my planet when "news" and "science" like this passes muster.