Egg Intake and the Incidence of Alzheimer's Disease in Adventist Health Study-2
sciencedirect.comCaveat:
> Funding [...] The analyses in this study were supported by an investigator-initiated grant from the American Egg Board. [...]
That's all I need to see to stop reading the study. Sponsored science is just noise.
it's not necessarily the case that it's junk science, but it is absolutely beyond the capabilities of a normal person or persons to winnow out the chaff.
It's claimed that around 90% of Americans are choline deficient. Eggs are one the best nutritional sources for choline. There are several papers linking low choline levels with Altzheimer disease so it would not be surprising to find a link between egg consumption and Altzheimer incidence. Sponsored studies should indeed be treated with much caution but is anyone suggesting such authors invent positive results or ignore highly inconvenient results? Such behavior would be reprehensible and not something with which a researcher would wish to be associated.
> such authors... ignore highly inconvenient results?
There are plenty of examples where that does seem to happen. Not sure if anyone has done a comparison with rate of non-publication by non-interest group funded studies. Probably difficult given there's not much motivation to uncover non-publication without the anti-corporate sensationalism.
Wow, ad hominem reasoning as a principal for info consumption. I ought to shake your hand. In all seriousness, I can appreciate the time-economic value to your policy, but wouldn't regard it is as an epistemic device.
That's an ad hominem argument, though.
And all science these days is sponsored these days, given the shortage of self-funding landed gentry. And there's no guarantee that landed gentry won't be pushing an agenda, either.
Virtually all the drugs you take, interventions, cancer treatments, etc. are based on such science.
Almost everything we have in modern medicine is.
This whole position is nonsense. The paper stands on its own.
Your logic is, "nothing's perfect so everything is equally good (or bad)".
Which is not true in this case.
For better and sometimes worse, the process through which medical drugs and procedures come to market, including studies and trials, is heavily regulated.
The Egg Board, however, is free to choose whichever studies to fund they prefer, and will gravitate to ones likely to show the positive effects of eggs and avoid ones likely to show the opposite.
The content of the paper may be entirely legitimate, but it still actually tells us nothing about whether we should eat more eggs or not.
And that's a problem. The best case scenario is it biases published results for things that benefit the sponsors. But there is certainly some amount of fraud including fabricated data, misinterpreted or exaggerated conclusions, suppressed research that isn't what the sponsor wants, etc.
>Virtually all the drugs you take, interventions, cancer treatments, etc. are based on such science.
So it's 'science' done wrong. The implications are that most drugs are useless if not outright harmful.
This isn't a drug study. It's about food and nutrition, one of the most intentionally misled topics around. I put the blame for that squarely on those who sponsor studies like this that don't help anyone. They are just muddying the waters further. Any food you look at will have some good qualities, like being a good source of Vitamin C. It's like saying a block of calcium is a good source of vitamin C: of course it is! But that doesn't mean it's healthy to eat
Egg Council at it again.
[The Simpsons] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHAFMFFQlkI https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Egg_Council_Guy
They didn't fund the health study, they funded this paper to point out the positive data in the study.
There's two way to bias independent research through funding. The most nefarious is to fund a whole bunch of research, and only publish the favored results. By ignoring enough failed attempts, it's even possible to get false-positive successes, through random chance. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/)
The second way is to only fund research that is likely to be favorable. E.g. if you sell vitamin supplements, you only fund research on people with bad diets, but not people who eat healthy diets that likely aren't affected by supplements.
In this case, it's leaning so far into the latter, that it's just pointing out positive research that someone else found.
That's not a caveat, that's a 100% disqualifier.
Did we ever get a sponsored study which was preregistered? I checked OSF and AsPredicted, as per my AI, and this study was not preregistered.
The source of funding is not the only suspicious thing...
From the actual study, which is free to read [0]:
>Dietary intake was assessed at baseline using a validated, self-administered FFQ that included >200 food items
So out of 200 potential associations, eggs were the winner? See this famous xkcd: Green jelly beans linked to acne.[1]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002231662...
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant
Your assertion, such as it is, is poorly formed. This research did not, as you imply, test 200 potential associations and report the one that was the “winner”. A single /a priori/ hypothesis was formulated and then tested using the data, in accordance with standard statistical methodology. The logical extension of your statement is that no association could ever be found since anything found is just a green-jelly bean association. When multiple tests of hypotheses are performed, accepted statistical practice is to the make the criterion for significance more stringent precisely to avoid the green-jellybean effect you are implying has occurred here.
Similarly illogical is pointing out the size of the questionnaire - as though the number of questions a person is asked has any impact whether eggs have an effect on Alzheimer’s disease incidence.
The questionnaire included 200 food items. Within the study, 9 food categories are listed. No adjustment for multiple hypothesis testing is reported in the methods section.
We have to take it on faith that they did in fact specifically set out to determine if egg consumption was associated with Alzheimer's disease...
A quick search shows that other studies both do [0] and do not [1] link egg consumption with Alzheimer's disease.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38782209/; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31360988/
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28052883/; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33561122/
LMAO, good catch. And I was about to look into it further!
Full title:
Egg Intake and the Incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease in the Adventist Health Study-2 Cohort Linked with Medicare Data
Via StudyFinds:
Eating Eggs Regularly May Significantly Slash Alzheimer’s Risk
https://studyfinds.com/eating-eggs-regularly-may-significant...
Maybe a sort of interesting study but it's observational and full of speculative mechanistic fluff, and I don't think it controls well enough. We're kinda past the point of egg studies, just study the mechanisms speculated on in an intervention study, right?
> ...adjusting for other dietary factors, demographic variables, lifestyle behaviors, and comorbidities.
They give the data for the specific factors. What is the missing variable which explains their result?
Daily hours of sunlight? Average number of sudoku completions per day?
Sort of obvious, like dietary differences? They attempt a specific vegan control, but what if you aren't vegan but also dislike the taste of meat? What if you don't have a diagnosed health condition, but have a family history so you avoid eggs?
This isn't that complicated. Observational studies just have these weaknesses. We're past the point of observation here, as I said, and it's time to try intervention testing.
Keep in mind this is also a study of Seventh Day Adventists who while not required to be vegetarians are encouraged to be and are going to have a low rate of meat consumption. edit: fixed wording
You mean, "Low rate of meat consumption"?
Yep, sorry fixed it.
FWIW The lowest hazard ratio they came up with in both their models was 5+ eggs/wk + 1 portion (14g) nuts/seeds per day.
The study wasn't about veganism so it isn't as useful as other finer-grained dietary patterns or intake variables which they account for.
Would taking choline pills help the same way? I think so.
research by The Egg Council
Off topic: is it just me or did Cloudflare‘s human check become incredibly slow?
> Cloudflare‘s human check become incredibly slow
Usually bearable (~10 seconds wait and usually requires click), but some sites have a short expiry. Means you get hit with the check repeatedly while browsing the same site, which is more annoying than the initial check itself.
Slow and ubiquitous. Cloudflare is apparently 90% of the sites I browse...
And AdBlock Plus interferes with it, so I have to pause blocking to even see the human check dealio.