Month: August 2014

More on Diet Drinks: Best Studies Show They Aid Weight Loss

Sugar in Processed Foods – UCSF

One theme we’re going to return to over and over here is the bad science we see in media every day. Media needs content, so even bad studies with no control groups and self-reporting are trumpeted as news, which is one reason why we are assaulted by supposed proof of a diet or health question one day, then fed “proof” of the opposite the next. It’s all to keep you clicking and getting views to pay for the news site; the study promoters want the world to think their results are meaningful so they’ll get funding to do more. Incentives to hype are great, and so hype is what we get.

You can learn to read the studies for yourself to understand which to pay attention to. Or you can read specialty publications that have a record of understanding how real science works so you can rely on them when they say a study’s conclusions are really valid. That’s what I’m trying to do here — I read all the press releases so you don’t have to.

Today’s example is a large meta-analysis by Paige Miller and Vanessa Perez of the Center for Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Computational Biology, Exponent Inc., published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. A meta-analysis is a statistical study of a basket of other studies which attempts to discern a better answer to questions raised than the individual studies by combining them; techniques for doing this are complex, but the usual result is to quantify a trend in answers over a much larger examined population. The abstract [with my annotations]:

Background: Replacement of caloric sweeteners with lower- or no-calorie alternatives may facilitate weight loss or weight maintenance by helping to reduce energy intake; however, past research examining low-calorie sweeteners (LCSs) and body weight has produced mixed results. [They will go on to show only unreliable studies show diet drinks induce weight gain.]

Objective: The objective was to systematically review and quantitatively evaluate randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and prospective cohort studies, separately, that examined the relation between LCSs and body weight and composition. [A prospective cohort study identifies a sample, characterizes each element of the sample typically by measuring or questioning, then follows the sample to try to show what initial conditions lead to what outcomes.]

Design: A systematic literature search identified 15 RCTs and 9 prospective cohort studies that examined LCSs from foods or beverages or LCSs consumed as tabletop sweeteners. Meta-analyses generated weighted mean differences in body weight and composition values between the LCS and control groups among RCTs and weighted mean correlations for LCS intake and these parameters among prospective cohort studies.

Results: In RCTs, LCSs modestly but significantly reduced all outcomes examined, including body weight (−0.80 kg; 95% CI: −1.17, −0.43), body mass index [BMI (in kg/m2): −0.24; 95% CI: −0.41, −0.07], fat mass (−1.10 kg; 95% CI: −1.77, −0.44), and waist circumference (−0.83 cm; 95% CI: −1.29, −0.37). Among prospective cohort studies, LCS intake was not associated with body weight or fat mass, but was significantly associated with slightly higher BMI (0.03; 95% CI: 0.01, 0.06). [Emphasis mine: only the unscientific prospective cohort studies showed weight gain for diet drink consumers.]

Conclusions: The current meta-analysis provides a rigorous evaluation of the scientific evidence on LCSs and body weight and composition. Findings from observational studies showed no association between LCS intake and body weight or fat mass and a small positive association with BMI; however, data from RCTs, which provide the highest quality of evidence for examining the potentially causal effects of LCS intake, indicate that substituting LCS options for their regular-calorie versions results in a modest weight loss and may be a useful dietary tool to improve compliance with weight loss or weight maintenance plans.

So what we can see here is that self-promoters who wanted to show low-calorie sweeteners had negative effects on body weight and metabolism were citing poor, uncontrolled studies. They explained this supposed effect by claiming these sweeteners confused metabolism by triggering insulin release through their effect on taste buds, but there was no evidence of that. One plausible explanation for the studies showing weight increases for those who reported drinking diet sodas is that such people are already aware of their tendency toward weight gain, and are more likely to consume diet drinks as a result; other factors about them create the weight gain, and their knowledge of their propensity to gain weight is the cause for their choosing to drink diet sodas. Those other causes of weight gain continue during the study, so naturally this population gains more weight than the unconcerned.

Our meta-takeaway from the meta-analysis: correlation is not causation. If you personally want to change some practice or undergo a procedure to improve something about yourself, pay very little attention to studies which are not randomized, controlled trials or their equivalent. Another good example of this is the constant drumbeat of Conventional Wisdom claiming that going to college increases your future earnings; the figures cited are almost always ignoring the fact that people who complete college have thereby been screened for aptitude for admission and then screened again for the ability to stick to a plan. If you are trying to decide whether or not to go to college, your aptitude and fortitude are already determined, and the effect of going vs. not going for you is much less, especially when you evaluate the opportunity costs: what you could be doing instead of college to educate yourself and grow your earnings capacity. Some people (and you might be one of them) would earn more by starting their own business or going to a high tech startup and skipping higher education. Not that earnings are the most important thing; one common pattern is to gain admission to a prestigious school with excellent networking connections and use those ties to jump into a business without bothering to finish school (the route of Bill Gates and many other entrepreneurs.)

Learn to recognize the lies and distortions in the Conventional Wisdom, and chart your own course.

Now it’s likely true that simply drinking water or tea instead of any soft drink is the healthiest option. But for those who appreciate the carbonation and sweet taste of a diet soda, you should feel free to indulge, in moderation. Diet sodas are far better for your body than sugared sodas, large servings of fruit juice, or jazzy Starbucks or Jamba Juice concoctions.

For more on this topic:

Sugared Soft Drinks: Health Risk? (and What About Diet Soda?)
Another Study on Diet Drinks
Fructose: The True Villain?
More on “Fed Up”, Sugar Subsidies, and Obesity

More on science-based diet for health and fat loss:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Starbucks, Jamba Juice Make You Fat
Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat. Government Guidelines Did!
‘Fed Up’ Asks, Are All Calories Equal?
LeBron James Cut Carbs for Lean Look
Why We’re Fat: In-Depth Studies Under Way
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
Vani Hari: “Food Babe” and Quack
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Sugared Soft Drinks: Health Risk? (and What About Diet Soda?)
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Acidic Soft Drinks and Sodas: Demineralization Damages Teeth
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy
Bulletproof Coffee: Coffee, Oil, and Butter for Breakfast?

Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech

Google Sign

GigaOm has a good overview of the recent diversity data released by major tech companies after a push by Jesse Jackson. The data shows women, and blacks underrepresented compared to total US population ratios, but no comparison to Silicon Valley-specific numbers. Asians are massively overrepresented, but this reflects the large number of Indian and Chinese engineers who have migrated to the Bay Area. There is no data on age, which would likely show a deficiency of older workers.

This is a fine example of the conflict between meritocratic equality of opportunity and equality of outcome proponents. The lack of representation of women and blacks in computer science and engineering courses, majors, and graduates means it is impossible for all or even one company to recruit enough qualified women or minority workers to show proportional representation. Great pressure to do so would mean compromising quality and hiring less capable employees, and less capable programmers are actually worse than useless to a team — they hold back progress on a task. A super-programmer is capable of producing 100x as much valuable output as a mediocre programmer, and a bad programmer produces output that actually decreases the viability of the product.

The apparent belief of our bureaucratic masters is that there is a binary function: qualified or unqualified. A company which hires the objectively best candidate for a job is not protected from claims of discrimination; the bar must be set low enough so that there is a pool of “qualified” candidates, and the hiring should prefer the candidates from underrepresented classes until the workforce is representative. This views employees as replaceable cogs that each have the same value to the work product, very much an old industrial union idea — where those who did more were pressured to stop overachieving so as to make slackers look average.

This is, of course, a recipe for failure in a competitive, international marketplace. We all await their efforts to equalize men in nursing and teaching, as well as all the other fields where there are notable group differences in interest and ability.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Bulletproof Coffee: Coffee, Oil, and Butter for Breakfast?

I’ve been aware of Dave Asprey’s “Bulletproof” brand of coffee, laced with special oil and butter, for some time. It’s an intriguing idea, promising that a tasty, buttery cup of coffee can clear your head faster and replace a good breakfast for workers who want to start their day at maximum mental speed. Since he’s an Internet promoter like Vani Hari “Food Babe,” I was suspicious but never investigated — I like to see an underdog contest the conventional wisdom, and we now know a dose of butter with breakfast does no harm. But what about the lack of protein in his ketogenic breakfast?

Fast Company has a good story by Chris Gayomali, who tried out the (expensive) entrepreneur’s special coffee kit:

Separately those ingredients don’t exactly tick all the traditional boxes for a balanced breakfast. But together they are the three components you need to make Bulletproof coffee, a frothy, energy-igniting beverage that has surged in recent years to become the toast of Silicon Valley. Its promises are multitude, at least according to its creator, cloud-computing pioneer and “Bulletproof Executive” Dave Asprey, who refined his recipe after trying a tea made with yak-butter in Nepal.

Among Bulletproof coffee’s listed benefits: It triggers weight loss by way of ketosis, a metabolic state triggered by a lack of carbs that kicks fat-burning into overdrive; it kills pesky cravings; and it boosts cognitive function, mainlining a shining dose of mental clarity into your foggy morning skull. Maybe it would even fold my laundry.

Most of all, though, Bulletproof coffee is intended to be efficient, an easy way for the biohacking crowd to slurp down fats and calories (460 of them!) without so much as sniffing a processed carbohydrate. Why eat a muffin that goes straight to your muffin top, the thinking goes, when you could drink down the metabolic equivalent of supercharged battery acid every morning?

Quite right about the muffins. Starbucks has been seducing on-the-go workers with sugar-laden baked goods to go with their quick coffee drinks (many of them also sugar-laced) for years now. The result has been fatter customers who barely realize how much sugar they’re consuming. As for clarity of thought, it’s likely a dose of stimulant and digestible fats will leave you mentally clearer than a heavy meal with protein, but also likely that you will run out of fuel before lunchtime. Meanwhile, Asprey claims his coffee is specially processed to remove harmful fungal toxins; this is one mark of the quack, the claim that only his product has some special quality and the rest are poison. Otherwise, you could avoid paying him premium prices and mix your own coffee-butter-oil concoction. Joe Rogan, who runs a popular broadcast, was apparently taken in and then disillusioned:

I fell down a rabbit hole. Apparently Asprey had appeared on Rogan’s podcast a few days prior, expounding on Bulletproof’s many miracles. Ever the charmer, Asprey had converted a wide-eyed Rogan to the Church of Grass-Fed Butter, and Rogan would go on to sing BPC’s praises anywhere he had a pulpit.

The singing didn’t last long, though. Rogan soon discovered that one of Asprey’s key claims–that 70% of all coffee beans were laced in vitality-sapping mycotoxins, which he claimed also makes coffee bitter–turned out to be false.

“Good coffee providers know how to eliminate this from coffee,” Rogan said on his show, citing a study he found on PubMed from the 1980s. “They’ve been able to solve it [for decades] with something called wet processing.” When the coffee plant’s berries are picked, the cherry (or bean) is “washed” in running water before it’s left to ferment and dry, reducing mycotoxin levels to negligible amounts. Everyone from Stumptown to Starbucks washes their beans this way.

That’s why Rogan was pissed. He felt betrayed, and accused Asprey of spouting pseudoscience veiled as fact. “There’s some bullshit there, for sure,” he said. “He used my platform in a way that’s non-ethical.”

Then there’s the lack of staying power in a meal of only coffee and fat (butter and the special oil, which has medium-chain triglycerides which are easily digested.) Your body needs protein, especially after 12 hours without a meal, and a breakfast without protein will have your body starving your muscle mass to sustain itself. The reporter noticed that he grew weak with hunger long before lunch:

“I would most certainly not recommend it,” says Christopher Ochner, a nutrition expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. “Now there is a little bit of data on the use of medium-chain triglycerides for weight loss and regulating cholesterol. But the effect is very, very small.”

A few days after the experiment concluded, I asked Dr. Ochner why I was still hungry after drinking down hundreds of calories worth of saturated fat every morning. “Well, that’s not actually surprising,” he says. “The people making these claims know there’s a lot of evidence that drinks and shakes don’t really make people feel full. Even if you drink a big Coke with your meal or whatever, and that could be 400 calories or more, it doesn’t really make a huge dent in people’s appetite. It’s the same concept.”

I wouldn’t recommend this kind of breakfast, though a bit of cream or butter in your coffee would not hurt. At least have two eggs or some fish along with it to supply needed protein.

For more on good diets and science-based fat losing techniques:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Starbucks, Jamba Juice Make You Fat
Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat. Government Guidelines Did!
‘Fed Up’ Asks, Are All Calories Equal?
Fructose: The True Villain?
More on “Fed Up”, Sugar Subsidies, and Obesity
Another Study on Diet Drinks
LeBron James Cut Carbs for Lean Look
Why We’re Fat: In-Depth Studies Under Way
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
More on Diet Drinks: Best Studies Show They Aid Weight Loss
Vani Hari: “Food Babe” and Quack
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Sugared Soft Drinks: Health Risk? (and What About Diet Soda?)
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Acidic Soft Drinks and Sodas: Demineralization Damages Teeth
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy

Public Schools in Poor Districts: For Control Not Education

Primary Classroom

This fascinating report from Third Way’s Social Policy and Politics Program on new teachers sets out the problem (teaching is seen as a career for not very bright people, and so enrollees in teacher training schools come from the bottom third of their undergraduate classes) and suggest some systemic solutions that would upgrade the quality of teaching graduates and thus of public school teaching.

If the country is doing poorly, a big part of it is mediocrity or worse in public elementary schools. And it’s not a matter of insufficient spending, but the reduced status and intellect of teachers due to a widespread (and correct) perception that they have little autonomy and are paid regardless of competence. (I of course have teacher friends who are uniformly brilliant, but we’re talking averages!) This report has some obvious suggestions for change, but entrenched interests wouldn’t allow anything so sensible. Right now the best teachers gravitate to the most favored schools, while the worst end up teaching in poor inner-city schools.

Students entering schools of education in the US are generally from the bottom third of undergraduates. There are many reasons why primary school teaching especially now has a reputation of being a place for lesser achievers, but one primary one is image — public schools have a reputation for being bureaucratic and not rewarding excellence, which tends to repel those who want to excel.

As we saw in the recent California case which decided teacher tenure as practiced there is inherently damaging to poor children, most locales have a recruiting and transfer system that allows the higher-quality teachers to migrate to high-quality schools in wealthier areas. The sorting by wealth and class in neighborhoods extends to sorting by school quality — wealthier areas have good schools where well-brought-up students don’t require all of a teacher’s time just to maintain order, and so public schools are reasonably good in better neighborhoods. Who wouldn’t transfer out of dysfunctional inner-city schools, given a chance? The poor quality of schools in poor inner-city neighborhoods only accelerates segregation by class, with motivated parents doing everything they can to qualify their children for residence in towns with better schools.

Young students need the stimulation of a professional, highly-intelligent adult to make the most of their young brains. Children who are already short-changed by poor family situations and less stimulating parents have even less chance to make up for it in public schools in their neighborhoods.

And remember that a graduating class of primary school teachers that averages 500 on the SAT means half of that class is below that (not so hot) level, some at 400 and below. Those teachers end up teaching the underprivileged kids who need exposure to excellence the most.

Average people do not control what their government does; in areas like education, it is a permanent bureaucracy (teacher’s colleges, unions, state and federal education funding) that does. Excellence is seen as threatening and equality elevated, and the value system taught is not at all what most parents would want if they were given much say in the matter.

Inquisitive children do not have to be “beaten down” to be neglected. Rewards for approved social behavior and conformity over individual achievement tend to discourage the less socially-adept boys. The smart ones learn to control their behavior to conform, but they don’t get exposed to role models doing cool intellectual work. Being separated out from larger society and penned in female-dominated schools which in many cases act as if their role as free day care is more important, many boys naturally want nothing further to do with schools. As always, wealthy areas have a robust commitment to achievement and bourgeois values that sustains healthy civilization despite the extended state support for barbarism, so boys there do better — accomplished dads make up for a lot. But as dysfunction creeps into middle and upper class lives, expect more political support for reform.

One reform that would greatly improve choice and reward excellence, and be especially helpful to poor parents in poor neighborhoods: give each child a voucher for the amount currently spent on their schooling, and let the parents and child choose from competing schools. Any school which met the qualifications would be able to compete for students, and the bureaucracies (administrators, education schools, and state and federal education departments) would have to value what parents want far more than they do now. Pilot programs are a step in the right direction and have been shown to increase student achievement, though as a complex system it would take many more years to have the expected benefits.

Recommended further reading: a long but excellent piece in the Atlantic written by Florina Rodov, an idealistic young teacher experiencing New York’s urban school environment. In the end, the bureaucracy won.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

More on education and child development :

Student Loan Debt: Problems in Divorce
Early Child Development: The High Cost of Abuse and Neglect
Child Welfare Ideas: Every Child Gets a Government Guardian!
Tuitions Inflated, Product Degraded, Student Debts Unsustainable
Free Range Kids vs Paranoid Child Welfare Authorities
“Crying It Out” – Parental Malpractice!
Brazilian For-Profit Universities Bring Quality With Quantity
The Affordable, Effective University: Indiana and Mitch Daniels
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
“Attachment Parenting” – Good Idea Taken Too Far?
Real Self-Esteem: Trophies for Everyone?
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Steven Pinker on Harvard and Meritocracy
Social Justice Warriors, Jihadists, and Neo-Nazis: Constructed Identities

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Month: August 2014

More on Diet Drinks: Best Studies Show They Aid Weight Loss

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Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech

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Bulletproof Coffee: Coffee, Oil, and Butter for Breakfast?

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Public Schools in Poor Districts: For Control Not Education

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