On 2008-07-21, Matti Narkia wrote:
Hannah Gruen wrote:
Anyway, it's just not a well-designed study, IMO, even if it does show
advantage for the lower-carb plans (no surprise there.)

I have to disagree with you. Although not completely without flaws,
this is, however, a large, long term (2 years), well-designed and
well-published (NEJM) study, which compared well-designed and
well-known diets. Additionally, if it wasn't well-designed, it
probably wouldn't have been published in NEJM, the number one
medical journal in the world.

Here's an interesting excerpt from

Low-fat Diets May Not Be Best For Weight Loss, Study Suggests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080716171134.htm :

"Dr. Iris Shai is a researcher at the S. Daniel Abraham
International Center for Health and Nutrition in the Department of
Epidemiology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She conceived
the study with Dr. Stampfer, the senior author, while she was a
Fulbright fellow at Harvard School of Public Health and Channing
Laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts."

The reason this study was conducted and published is simply because it's
the type of thing which can attract media attention these days.
The institutions behind it become visible in the act of doing something
regarding a large problem which faces the general public.

It's nothing more than a circus show, of absolutely no consequence.

It's poor science, but it doesn't appear dishonest. That is to say, as long as
no data was falsified, no reputations are going to be damaged by this type of
thing.

Dr. Meir Stampfer is one of the authors of the study in question and
a very remarkable scientist. Harvard's press release

Maybe Stampfer is so confident in his credentials, that he no longer gives a
damn. If he wants to do a little bit of fun, unscientific pig farming, he can
boldly attach his name to it without scathing his reputation.

HSPH Department Chairs Meir Stampfer and Walter Willett Most Cited
Scientists of the Decade in Clinical Medicine
Harvard School of Public Health Press Release, Friday, September 23,
2005
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/press/releases/press09232005.html

from September 23, 2005, writes about him as follows:

"Meir Stampfer, Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the
Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has been ranked the number
one most cited scientist in clinical medicine for the last decade.
According to ISI Essential Science Indicators, 376 of his published
research findings were cited nearly 31,000 times between 1995 and
August of 2005."

In science, people cut-and-paste citations from other papers, without even
/reading/ the original papers that are being cited! Do you know that
misspellings in citations propagate among unrelated papers from different
authors?

The more citations you have in your paper, the more it seems that you have done
a thorough job of covering the prior research. There is a pressure to cite,
which leads to padded citations lists.

A citation is not always positive. There are citations which are used to
exemplify lesser quality prior work. If you include such a citation, it gives
you an opportunity to extend your paper by a paragraphs of text which does
nothing but criticize the earlier work, and explain how the new work improves
on it.

The choice of citation can also be influenced by the degree to which the cited
researcher confirms a hypothesis which the new researcher is trying to argue.
If your paper argues that unlimited amounts of energy can be obtained from a
perpetually moving machine, a significant fraction of your citations will be
to other crackpot papers.