What is “junk science?” To me, after five years of reporting on health and diet news, it’s any study backed by a group with an agenda, like dairy farmers saying full-fat milk has no health risks, or PETA insisting that a vegan diet is the only optimal diet for humans.
Those studies are tailor-made so that the results say exactly what the benefactors want them to say. That is junk science, not research which looks at a sample population and finds a certain eating habit (or trend) has a negative or positive effect on health, i.e. a correlation; hence the term “correlation study.”
Correlation studies take a lot of flak (mostly by non-scientists or people who, quite frankly, have no idea what they’re talking about), because they don’t prove cause-and-effect. But slamming correlation studies on principle is dumb. You can’t ignore a trend (or correlation) because it doesn’t directly say, “yes” or “no.”
Consider this. If 100 fishermen eat fish from the Hudson River every day for one year, and at the end of that year 50 of them get cancer, it’s pretty obvious that noshing on three-eyed Hudson River fish impacts cancer risk.
You could say that eating the mutant fish raise cancer risk by 50%, even after you account for the fishermen’s family history and lifestyle habits, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise. So knowing all that, most people would pass on any fish yanked from the murky depths of the Hudson River. You’d be stupid not to.
And here’s my point. Scientists and researchers (and ultimately us, the public) may never know if refined sugar 100% causes diabetes, or saturated fat from red meat directly causes heart disease, or eating fish from the Hudson River will give you cancer, but we’re smart enough to see the correlation, and that’s all you need to make informed decisions about what to eat.
If not, you’re gambling. You’re saying, I hope my food choices (most likely bad ones) don’t come back to bite me, even though everything tells me they probably will. Listen, don’t take chances with your health like that, it’s silly. Sure, deep-fried bacon tastes good, but that’s no excuse to pretend it isn’t bad for you.
Our far less intelligent cavemen ancestors figured out that walking into the Saber Tooth Tiger cave is risky business, after seeing many of their tribesmen come running out maimed, or not at all. Odds are the giant predator had something to do with it, even if they didn’t see it tear their friends from limb to limb.
So, next time you read a correlation study, don’t be so quick to yell “junk science,” because most likely you’re wrong… maybe even dead wrong.
