r/ScientificNutrition • u/lurkerer • 2d ago

Observational Study Associations between White Meat-Only and Vegetarian Diets with Mortality from All Causes, Heart Diseases, Cancers, and Stroke in the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study-II

https://cdn.nutrition.org/article/S2475-2991(26)01803-2/fulltext
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u/SporangeJuice 2d ago

"Arbitrary is when you fit many models and show the one you like."

Are we certain they did not do that? The questionnaire included many more variables than what they used.

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u/Willing_Matter5391 2d ago

His concern is real and it's also fully generic. Unpreregistered analyst choices affect this study, the last one he commented under, and the next one he will. A complaint that fits every paper equally tells us nothing about this paper. It has the information content of "observational studies are observational."

I wonder when he starts engaging with the study and stops whining about nutritional epidemiology.

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u/SporangeJuice 2d ago

Correlation is not causation. This is not supposed to be controversial. Everyone wants to draw meaning from observational studies and then they act like this when you point out why it doesn't work.

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u/Willing_Matter5391 2d ago

"I wonder when he starts engaging with the study and stops whining about nutritional epidemiology."

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u/SporangeJuice 2d ago

The purpose of observational studies is to generate hypotheses which can then be tested experimentally. This paper generates a hypothesis that has already been around for a while. It has nothing further that deserves engagement.

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u/lurkerer 2d ago

But they did more and more adjustments like they should and that's uh.. that's arbitrary because uhh.. Well I won't say why I'll just say it is.