My supermarket has stopped selling salted peanut butter. An intelligent analysis of the statistics about salt and hypertension will conclude that if you have high blood pressure you should lay off the salt. If you don’t have high blood pressure – well, never mind. 

So my supermarket is restricting my choice to protect the hypertensive. Given that motivation, I wonder why they have the nerve to sell peanut butter at all. For some people, peanut butter kills.

And they sell rib-eye steaks on special! Thankfully.

Science reporters need to be fluent in statistical analysis. I suspect that even many medical researchers are not competent statisticians, and it is clear to me that most science reporters at the Globe & Mail are not.

Oh sorry. This isn’t the Globe & Mail. But same goes for Maclean’s obviously. And for just about every news provider that hires journalists out of JSchool.

The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, a statistician, is a very interesting and entertaining read. I recommend it to anyone bewildered by the “do this” and then ” no do this” story that is coming out of popular “science” articles.

Scientific American:

It may be. It very well may be. Or the science that we have is completely adequate and we already have the answer. I was once at a sodium meeting at which there were a bunch of statisticians. And I left with the statisticians and they said that “anyone who thinks that salt has anything to do with hypertension is delusional.”
 
And that was on the basis on the clinical trials that show so little. And yet every single committee that has dealt with this question says, “We really need to lower the sodium in the food supply.” 

Wall St Journal:

The larger lesson of the Gould-Morton affair is that bias is everywhere, that many of our studies are shot through with unconscious errors and subtle prejudices. To Paul Simon, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest.

In recent years, it’s become clearer that these psychological shortcomings are a serious societal problem. Because we believe we’re impervious to bias—we’re blind to our own blind spots—we assume that our judgment isn’t affected by financial incentives or personal opinions. 

This problem has been most convincingly demonstrated in medical clinical trials …. 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576397771567839728.html

Scientific American:

Is salt bad for us? In just the past few months researchers have published seemingly contradictory studies showing that excess sodium in the diet leads to heart disease, reduces your blood pressure, or has no effect at all. 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-salt-wars-rage-on-a-c

” …. from lunch cancer and heart disease …. ”

New kind of cancer or freudian slip of what you think they are serving you at Rogers building?