Posted by Todd Zywicki: DEVESTATING CRITIQUE OF SOFT DRINK STUDY: Steven Milloy has a [1]devestating critique of the soft drink study. He concludes first that the study itself is riddled with methodological problems. He writes: "Moreover, the study reports that women who consistently drank one or more regular soft drinks per day during those four years actually gained slightly less weight than women who consistently drank less than one soda per week during that same period. The researchers' contention that soda intake is linked with type 2 diabetes is also not borne out by their data or anyone else's. The media-spotlighted claim of an 83 percent increase in diabetes among consumers of more than one soda per day -- itself an inherently weak association from a statistical perspective -- is misleading. When the researchers statistically adjusted their results for bodyweight (a risk factor for diabetes) and for caloric intake (a proxy measure for consumption of sweetened foods other than soda), the 83 percent increase dropped to an even more statistically dubious (and soft-pedaled) 32 percent increase. That result is of the same magnitude as the study's reported 21 percent increase in diabetes among consumers of more than one diet soft drink per day. Diet drinks, of course, do not contain any sugar at all." In addition he notes that the study itself fails to acknowledge a conlfict with a 2003 study that concluded that sugar intake does not increase the risk of Type 2 dabetes. The problem is that one of the coauthors on the new study was also a co-author on the prior study. "Certainly Willett and his co-authors could claim it was mere oversight on their part to not even mention this major conflicting study in the write-up of their study," Milloy writes, "but that assertion would be on thin ice given that Harvard Medical School's JoAnn Manson was a co-author of both studies!"
References 1. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,130263,00.html _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
