In today’s “don’t believe what you read” entry, we have a real doozy. It’s all over the news. Girls who drink more sugar
sweetened soda have their first period a few months earlier than those who
don’t. The only problem with this study is, well, pretty much
the whole thing. Had anyone bothered to actually read the paper,
they might have been less accepting of the conclusion. This is because there
are so many obvious flaws in the study that jump right off the pages. And they
are not hard to spot. Let’s take a look at some.
The paper, “Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and age
at menarche in a prospective study of US girls” was published by a group from
the Harvard School of Public Health—an organization we have often criticized
for their dependence upon large datasets and their tendency toward using
data-dredging to exaggerate associations and implicitly claim a
cause-and-effect link not justified by their data.
The essence of the paper is that girls, aged 9-14, who
drank more than 1.5 “sugary drinks per day” reached menarche 2.7 months earlier
than those who drank less than this. But do the data support the conclusion?..... The only
problem with this study is, well, pretty much the whole thing. Read more.
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