Nutrition Claims Based on Biased Studies?
Whenever I post about certain food items being good against certain maladies, I am always careful to emphasize that some studies are still on the early stages of research, often involving animal studies. While the results are promising and thus merit their being published in this blog, extensive, long-term human trials are necessary to conclusively say such and such food are good against so and so health problem.
Sadly, not all potential functional foods and nutraceuticals undergo the kind of rigorous testing required by the FDA to prove that they are indeed effective against a certain disease or not. Not only is the task complicated, it is also rather costly. And when a big multinational company funds a research study on one of its products, one cannot help asking if perhaps some of the data are skewed or distorted to show the results they want to see. This article in Scientific American brings the point home:
The influence of sponsors may be unconscious, the investigators suggest, and could occur at many levels, manifested by how researchers pose questions in the hypothesis, how they design studies, which data they collect or do not collect, how they analyze the data and how they derive their conclusions.
But how does one get unbiased results? As it is, government funds are never quite enough.
Tags: diet, functional-foods, health, health-food, Healthy Eating, healthy-diet, nutraceutical, nutrition, nutrition-research, research, scienceRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Food Talk
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