I wanted to share one more thought about the various crises in "studies show" science.
We're finding a lot of errors in a lot of past studies, and--hopefully--we're fixing them. Or at the least we've been given the opportunity to change our beliefs when it turns out they were based on erroneous or unreplicable studies. This is good. And it's a halfway decent attempt at actually using the scientific method.
But think about this: Imagine you're a "studies show" scientist, and consider the various pressures out there arrayed against you if take it upon yourself to uncover these types of errors. It takes precious time away from your own research. You look vaguely like a jerk for criticizing your peers. You get stonewalled when you ask to see peoples' data. And the research world is small: nobody wants to find errors in the work of someone you might work with (or worse, work for) in the future.
Worst of all by far: you don't get paid for it.
There is absolutely no incentive structure out there for finding study errors. In fact there are enormous incentives not to find them.
So it makes you even more cynical about "studies show" science: if they're finding as many errors as they are--despite all the pressures and reasons not to find them--how many more errors must there be?
READ NEXT: Rebellion Practice
Showing posts with label worry porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worry porn. Show all posts
You May Now Ignore All Scientific Studies
Readers, I've developed a cognitive rule of thumb for "scientific studies" that I now use whenever I hear or read about any study. Here it is:
Heuristic: Any study you see, ever, anywhere, that happens to reach you through the media is wrong in some fundamentally significant way. You may safely ignore it.
My first halting step toward this admittedly cynical mental rule came a long time ago: when "scientists" decided--but then later undecided--that margarine was better for you than butter. I took another halting step toward this cynical rule when the "don't eat eggs" study came out, a study that blissfully ignored the fact that dietary cholesterol is not blood serum cholesterol.
My steps became a lot less halting thereafter, as I thought through what "scientists" used to think was true. Things like:
* "Healthy whole grains."
* An entirely upside down food pyramid.
* Recommendations for statin meds because of a "studies show" link to cardiovascular health that turned out to be wholly imaginary.
* The fact that the medical profession can't seem to define normal blood pressure.
* That toast causes cancer (yes, I'm serious: Google it).
There are many, many more examples, of course, some amusing, some not funny at all, some actually life-or-death. And all wrong. And if you have even a cursory understanding of decline effects[1] and the great crisis of reproducibility,[2] you will lose any remaining faith in "studies show" science.
Still more severe examples include South Korea's misguided war on thyroid cancer[3], or the highly counterintuitive discoveries that annual mammography screenings have zero effect on life expectancy and that, shockingly, prostate cancer screenings negatively affect life quality and life expectancy.[4]
And when it seems "studies show" science couldn't be any more wronger, it gets worse: We've discovered that even some of the most important and foundational studies in twentieth century psychology cannot be reproduced.[5] We're seeing major, domain-shattering acts of sheer data fabrication--see vaccines[6] and social psychology[7] for two object examples. Even in the food industry, one of America's best known dietary scientists, Cornell University's Brian Wansink, just got caught fabricating and torturing data to find links that don't really exist.[8]
And this is to say nothing of the various types of errors that inevitably show up in the study industry, as well as the rampant errors common to media coverage trumpeting study findings. These include errors like baseline risk error (an increase in a risk that's too small to matter is still too small to matter), p-hacking (mining data for statistical anomalies first, then forming a post hoc hypothesis on something that is almost assuredly spurious), and many others, some of which we've already discussed elsewhere at Casual Kitchen. And don't forget the well-known pressure to "publish or perish" in academia, which is most likely the prime driver of many of the industry's data fabrication and data-torturing scandals.
Last but certainly not least, there's the structural fact that the media--and it does not matter which media--inevitably oversimplifies or exaggerates all study claims to the point of making them into anti-information. And I have yet to read an article in my life saying "XYZ perfectly normal everyday activity shows no link to cancer." It's always the opposite.
You can safely ignore it all.
Finally, for any readers who consider this article to be somehow anti-science, keep in mind: "studies show" science is not science. It never was.
Footnotes/Resources:
[1] A readable article on the "Decline Effect," a genre of the problem of reproducibility.
[2] More good articles on the reproducibility crisis here and here.
[3] Korea and its misguided search for thyroid cancer as a textbook example of two types of silent risks: overscreening risk and overdiagnosis risk.
[4] For excellent discussions of why prostate screenings and mammography screenings carry silent risks and do not extend life, see Gerd Giggerenzer's book Risk Savvy and Gilbert Welch's book Less Medicine, More Health.
[5] Classic and foundational studies in pyschology cannot be successfully replicated.
[6] See for example the famously fraudulent “vaccines cause autism” study. Ironically, the paper pointing out the fraudulence itself had to be later corrected because it never acknowledged financial support from MMR vaccine makers. (!)
[7] “2011: A Year of Horrors” in social psychology.
[8] Bombshell allegations of data mining, p-hacking and other types of malfeasance shatter the credibility of dietary science professor Brain Wansink's entire department at Cornell University: here, here, and most depressingly: here.
Heuristic: Any study you see, ever, anywhere, that happens to reach you through the media is wrong in some fundamentally significant way. You may safely ignore it.
My first halting step toward this admittedly cynical mental rule came a long time ago: when "scientists" decided--but then later undecided--that margarine was better for you than butter. I took another halting step toward this cynical rule when the "don't eat eggs" study came out, a study that blissfully ignored the fact that dietary cholesterol is not blood serum cholesterol.
My steps became a lot less halting thereafter, as I thought through what "scientists" used to think was true. Things like:
* "Healthy whole grains."
* An entirely upside down food pyramid.
* Recommendations for statin meds because of a "studies show" link to cardiovascular health that turned out to be wholly imaginary.
* The fact that the medical profession can't seem to define normal blood pressure.
* That toast causes cancer (yes, I'm serious: Google it).
There are many, many more examples, of course, some amusing, some not funny at all, some actually life-or-death. And all wrong. And if you have even a cursory understanding of decline effects[1] and the great crisis of reproducibility,[2] you will lose any remaining faith in "studies show" science.
Still more severe examples include South Korea's misguided war on thyroid cancer[3], or the highly counterintuitive discoveries that annual mammography screenings have zero effect on life expectancy and that, shockingly, prostate cancer screenings negatively affect life quality and life expectancy.[4]
And when it seems "studies show" science couldn't be any more wronger, it gets worse: We've discovered that even some of the most important and foundational studies in twentieth century psychology cannot be reproduced.[5] We're seeing major, domain-shattering acts of sheer data fabrication--see vaccines[6] and social psychology[7] for two object examples. Even in the food industry, one of America's best known dietary scientists, Cornell University's Brian Wansink, just got caught fabricating and torturing data to find links that don't really exist.[8]
And this is to say nothing of the various types of errors that inevitably show up in the study industry, as well as the rampant errors common to media coverage trumpeting study findings. These include errors like baseline risk error (an increase in a risk that's too small to matter is still too small to matter), p-hacking (mining data for statistical anomalies first, then forming a post hoc hypothesis on something that is almost assuredly spurious), and many others, some of which we've already discussed elsewhere at Casual Kitchen. And don't forget the well-known pressure to "publish or perish" in academia, which is most likely the prime driver of many of the industry's data fabrication and data-torturing scandals.
Last but certainly not least, there's the structural fact that the media--and it does not matter which media--inevitably oversimplifies or exaggerates all study claims to the point of making them into anti-information. And I have yet to read an article in my life saying "XYZ perfectly normal everyday activity shows no link to cancer." It's always the opposite.
You can safely ignore it all.
Finally, for any readers who consider this article to be somehow anti-science, keep in mind: "studies show" science is not science. It never was.
Footnotes/Resources:
[1] A readable article on the "Decline Effect," a genre of the problem of reproducibility.
[2] More good articles on the reproducibility crisis here and here.
[3] Korea and its misguided search for thyroid cancer as a textbook example of two types of silent risks: overscreening risk and overdiagnosis risk.
[4] For excellent discussions of why prostate screenings and mammography screenings carry silent risks and do not extend life, see Gerd Giggerenzer's book Risk Savvy and Gilbert Welch's book Less Medicine, More Health.
[5] Classic and foundational studies in pyschology cannot be successfully replicated.
[6] See for example the famously fraudulent “vaccines cause autism” study. Ironically, the paper pointing out the fraudulence itself had to be later corrected because it never acknowledged financial support from MMR vaccine makers. (!)
[7] “2011: A Year of Horrors” in social psychology.
[8] Bombshell allegations of data mining, p-hacking and other types of malfeasance shatter the credibility of dietary science professor Brain Wansink's entire department at Cornell University: here, here, and most depressingly: here.
Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers (An Accidental, Secret Recipe for Massive Web Traffic)
I've often said that it bugs me to see a good blog go unread. It's one reason why I run Friday Links posts: it's my own small effort to put good stuff I find in front of more readers.
But today I want to ask the exact opposite question: why do certain really bad blogs get so much traffic?
An obvious example is The Food Babe, a site with an intriguing (and unintentional) recipe for wide readership. Deep down, we're all vaguely suspicious of modernity, technology and scary-sounding long words. If you play off these fears, worried readers come running to your site. Add in a conspiracy theory here and there for good measure, and things you write start to sound rhetorically persuasive.
Notice I said rhetorically persuasive, not scientifically persuasive. Or logically persuasive. But this is the key to the secret recipe! If you write something scientifically or logically laughable but rhetorically persuasive, you quickly generate a second-order readership. A second crew of readers, readers more competent in logic and basic scientific principles, will point out the scientific and logical flaws in your argument. Often with dripping condescension.
Then, the original readers, the credulous ones, argue back. After all, nobody likes being condescended to.
So, if there's such a thing as a typical Food Babe reader, it would break down into two general types:
1) Credulous first-order readers looking for new things to fear.
2) Second-order readers astounded at how dumb other people are.
So here's your business model: write posts for the first group, but make those posts unrigorous enough to attract the second group too. If you follow this secret recipe correctly, you get viral posts, exploding traffic stats, and some really entertaining comment wars.
This might be the only profitable business model in blogging--perhaps in all of online media. And it certainly helps explain the ubiquitous outrage porn, worry porn and political handwringing porn suffusing our overall cognitive environment these days.
And since fear-mongering and conspiracy-mongering are particularly effective forms of rhetoric, The Food Babe really cleaned up for a while there. That is, until her scientific incompetence became a little too obvious. When it got out that she wrote (but later deleted without comment or explanation) a post on the radiation risks of microwave ovens (it contained quotes like this one: "when you stand in front of a radar device you will start perspiring/cooking from the inside out, just like food is cooked in the microwave oven."), her already-tenuous credibility met its end. Fortunately for us, the internet never forgets. Eventually, goofily unscientific people get found out and exposed, even if they do try to scrub their sites of the most scientifically hilarious things they've said.
But! Some bloggers use these embarrassing things about themselves to grow their traffic even more. One of Tim Ferriss's best business insights back in the early days of SEO was to make sure he captured pageview traffic from the keywords "Tim Ferriss Scam."
So, he wrote a post titled, naturally, "Tim Ferriss Scam!" Interestingly, it doesn't rank as highly as it used to, illustrating yet another challenge of blogging: the ceaseless competition for traffic, everywhere, all the time, for any and all keywords.
Ironically, Ferriss' Tim Ferriss Scam! post actually contains some excellent ideas (the quotes from Scott Boras and Epictetus for example), and it's a smart post from the standpoint of using a writer's time, since it mostly contains meta-content, content reused and retreaded from other posts and sources. Talk about turning your detractors to your advantage.
By the way, Ferriss has had a few Food Babe moments of his own. Readers here at CK will remember my extended criticism of the flaws in his book The Four Hour Chef, for example. Or his uproariously implausible post: From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.[1]
Much like a typical Food Babe post, From Geek to Freak is an (unintended?) masterpiece of meta-conversation. With its waxed and spray-tanned before-and-after photos and its 1,300 (and growing) comments arguing over whether it's possible or impossible to gain 34 pounds of muscle in a month, it all becomes a twisted game.
His game, that is. We're the suckers, expending our attention and our finite cognitive resources. We argue for him even when we argue against him. Savvy readers ought to be able to see a parallel--a direct parallel--that's been playing out over the past several months in our political media.
The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence
Let's get back to the [Your name here] Scam post writing technique for a moment. Vani the Food Babe did one of these posts too, writing her own "Food Babe: Scam" post, and it's a veritable tour de force in unaware rhetoric [2] that drives home an interesting, if depressing point: the internet rewards incompetence. Write something incompetent, and people will read it, get mad, comment, and link back to you. Then, incompetent people read those comments, get mad, comment more, and link back to you. Competent people respond, comment more, write about you, link back to you, your search engine ranking goes higher and higher, and so on. Rinse, repeat... and sell ads!
If we carry this to its ultimate logical conclusion, we arrive at a useful general principle. Let's call it The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence: The most divisive and incompetent content tends to rise to the top of all search rankings. Think of it as an informational equivalent of The Peter Principle.[3]
So, in a way, maybe it's not a bad thing that sites like The Food Babe no longer attract the attention and profits they used to, and likewise, maybe it's a good sign that our biggest media institutions--as they play the same twisted game with far greater resources--are losing readers and money too.
Footnotes:
[1] Glass houses disclaimer: I've written plenty of posts that are bad, stupid, boring, unrigorous, wrong, etc., and I've also generated arguments between readers arguing for (and sometimes even against!) my incompetence. I try to do the best I can here at CK, but believe me, I come up short plenty of times too.
[2] Techniques include but are not limited to: using mean tweets against her (this is the so-called "tone fallacy": arguing that if you're not nice, your criticism is therefore disqualified); claiming "it's not about me" in a post self-evidently 100% about her, and using rhetorically powerful (but logically vacuous) phrases like "obviously, some powerful entities in the chemical and food industries have a financial incentive to try to discredit me" and "The bottom line is that many of these people who use this argument to discredit me, don't want the truth, regarding our food supply, coming out." One could easily write a satire using statements like these. Hey, wait: somebody already did!
[3] The Peter Principle states that every employee gets promoted up through an organization until he reaches a level where he's incompetent. Anyone working at any large corporation has seen this principle at work, and it is why, in the longer run, large organizations often tend toward generalized incompetence.
READ NEXT: Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
But today I want to ask the exact opposite question: why do certain really bad blogs get so much traffic?
An obvious example is The Food Babe, a site with an intriguing (and unintentional) recipe for wide readership. Deep down, we're all vaguely suspicious of modernity, technology and scary-sounding long words. If you play off these fears, worried readers come running to your site. Add in a conspiracy theory here and there for good measure, and things you write start to sound rhetorically persuasive.
Notice I said rhetorically persuasive, not scientifically persuasive. Or logically persuasive. But this is the key to the secret recipe! If you write something scientifically or logically laughable but rhetorically persuasive, you quickly generate a second-order readership. A second crew of readers, readers more competent in logic and basic scientific principles, will point out the scientific and logical flaws in your argument. Often with dripping condescension.
Then, the original readers, the credulous ones, argue back. After all, nobody likes being condescended to.
So, if there's such a thing as a typical Food Babe reader, it would break down into two general types:
1) Credulous first-order readers looking for new things to fear.
2) Second-order readers astounded at how dumb other people are.
So here's your business model: write posts for the first group, but make those posts unrigorous enough to attract the second group too. If you follow this secret recipe correctly, you get viral posts, exploding traffic stats, and some really entertaining comment wars.
This might be the only profitable business model in blogging--perhaps in all of online media. And it certainly helps explain the ubiquitous outrage porn, worry porn and political handwringing porn suffusing our overall cognitive environment these days.
And since fear-mongering and conspiracy-mongering are particularly effective forms of rhetoric, The Food Babe really cleaned up for a while there. That is, until her scientific incompetence became a little too obvious. When it got out that she wrote (but later deleted without comment or explanation) a post on the radiation risks of microwave ovens (it contained quotes like this one: "when you stand in front of a radar device you will start perspiring/cooking from the inside out, just like food is cooked in the microwave oven."), her already-tenuous credibility met its end. Fortunately for us, the internet never forgets. Eventually, goofily unscientific people get found out and exposed, even if they do try to scrub their sites of the most scientifically hilarious things they've said.
But! Some bloggers use these embarrassing things about themselves to grow their traffic even more. One of Tim Ferriss's best business insights back in the early days of SEO was to make sure he captured pageview traffic from the keywords "Tim Ferriss Scam."
So, he wrote a post titled, naturally, "Tim Ferriss Scam!" Interestingly, it doesn't rank as highly as it used to, illustrating yet another challenge of blogging: the ceaseless competition for traffic, everywhere, all the time, for any and all keywords.
Ironically, Ferriss' Tim Ferriss Scam! post actually contains some excellent ideas (the quotes from Scott Boras and Epictetus for example), and it's a smart post from the standpoint of using a writer's time, since it mostly contains meta-content, content reused and retreaded from other posts and sources. Talk about turning your detractors to your advantage.
By the way, Ferriss has had a few Food Babe moments of his own. Readers here at CK will remember my extended criticism of the flaws in his book The Four Hour Chef, for example. Or his uproariously implausible post: From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.[1]
Much like a typical Food Babe post, From Geek to Freak is an (unintended?) masterpiece of meta-conversation. With its waxed and spray-tanned before-and-after photos and its 1,300 (and growing) comments arguing over whether it's possible or impossible to gain 34 pounds of muscle in a month, it all becomes a twisted game.
His game, that is. We're the suckers, expending our attention and our finite cognitive resources. We argue for him even when we argue against him. Savvy readers ought to be able to see a parallel--a direct parallel--that's been playing out over the past several months in our political media.
The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence
Let's get back to the [Your name here] Scam post writing technique for a moment. Vani the Food Babe did one of these posts too, writing her own "Food Babe: Scam" post, and it's a veritable tour de force in unaware rhetoric [2] that drives home an interesting, if depressing point: the internet rewards incompetence. Write something incompetent, and people will read it, get mad, comment, and link back to you. Then, incompetent people read those comments, get mad, comment more, and link back to you. Competent people respond, comment more, write about you, link back to you, your search engine ranking goes higher and higher, and so on. Rinse, repeat... and sell ads!
If we carry this to its ultimate logical conclusion, we arrive at a useful general principle. Let's call it The Koontz Principle of Online Incompetence: The most divisive and incompetent content tends to rise to the top of all search rankings. Think of it as an informational equivalent of The Peter Principle.[3]
So, in a way, maybe it's not a bad thing that sites like The Food Babe no longer attract the attention and profits they used to, and likewise, maybe it's a good sign that our biggest media institutions--as they play the same twisted game with far greater resources--are losing readers and money too.
Footnotes:
[1] Glass houses disclaimer: I've written plenty of posts that are bad, stupid, boring, unrigorous, wrong, etc., and I've also generated arguments between readers arguing for (and sometimes even against!) my incompetence. I try to do the best I can here at CK, but believe me, I come up short plenty of times too.
[2] Techniques include but are not limited to: using mean tweets against her (this is the so-called "tone fallacy": arguing that if you're not nice, your criticism is therefore disqualified); claiming "it's not about me" in a post self-evidently 100% about her, and using rhetorically powerful (but logically vacuous) phrases like "obviously, some powerful entities in the chemical and food industries have a financial incentive to try to discredit me" and "The bottom line is that many of these people who use this argument to discredit me, don't want the truth, regarding our food supply, coming out." One could easily write a satire using statements like these. Hey, wait: somebody already did!
[3] The Peter Principle states that every employee gets promoted up through an organization until he reaches a level where he's incompetent. Anyone working at any large corporation has seen this principle at work, and it is why, in the longer run, large organizations often tend toward generalized incompetence.
READ NEXT: Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Toxic Kidney Beans?
We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
--Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
***********************
Readers, there's something new to worry about. If you want to, that is.
Toxic beans.
I learned about toxic beans thanks to a comment from Mike Vrobel at Dad Cooks Dinner on my Easy White Bean Stew recipe. Mike warned readers to watch out for the toxin phytohemagglutinin, which can be found in kidney beans and certain related white beans (cannellini beans for example, which are cousins of the kidney bean). Mike helpfully directed readers to a page at the US Food and Drug Administration's website discussing details of this risk (link here).
There's an easy fix, fortunately: just boil the beans for ten minutes or more. This breaks down the toxin.
But the possible problem here lies with kidney beans cooked in a crockpot or slow cooker while using the low setting. It's theoretically possible that someone's crockpot, on a low setting, might not bring the beans quite to the boiling point, which wouldn't break down the phytohemagglutinin toxin. You might then be eating toxic beans.
Clear so far?
Now, the easiest way to eliminate any risk of food-borne illness is to cook your food properly and thoroughly. If you're concerned about your crockpot's low setting while making my Easy Bean Soup, just look in on it after a few hours. Is the soup bubbling? If it is, you're in the clear.
However, I want to go further. I want to tackle this "toxic beans" issue on its own merits. Is this really a risk that we should worry about? Because, to be honest, it smells like yet another example of we here at Casual Kitchen call worry porn.
Before we analyze the true risk of toxic beans, I want to make two points. First, this is in no way a criticism of Mike. I love Mike's work. I always enjoy his insightful writing, and I've found significant value from his book Rotisserie Grilling,
which is literally the reference guide on the subject. He's a credit to the food blog world, and I'm grateful he brought up this issue--not least because it gave me the idea for today's post.
Second, in no way whatsoever am I saying that the risk of toxic beans isn't real. It is real, as we will soon see. Just rare.
Except that, well, human spontaneous combustion is real too. And also rare. So rare, in fact, that we can safely ignore it as a risk.
So really, the question is: how rare is death or illness due to improperly cooked kidney beans? Is it rare enough that we can ignore it?
Remember, we are surrounded by worries, and surrounded by a system of media designed specifically to grab our attention with worrisome things. As a result--and despite the fact that life in the modern era has never been safer--we are worrying more than ever.
So, it's up to us to choose: will we submit to every seemingly convincing fear tossed at us? (Protip: they will all sound convincing.) Or will we consider the fear rationally and disregard it if it lacks merit?
I'll give you the punchline first. With toxic beans we quickly arrive at an obvious conclusion: disregard for lack of merit.
What's sad and disturbing about this particular worry, however, is how much exaggerated and even incorrect information I found sitting, right there, on the FDA's phytohemagglutinin toxin factsheet.*
We'll get to the errors in a minute. But first, let's look at the prevalence and probabilities behind "kidney bean syndrome." The FDA cites one primary paper citing specific cases of this toxicity from the UK (see bullet point #6 on the factsheet). This study cites, for example, seven examples of "outbreaks" from 1976-1979. If you hunt down the study (a quick Google search uncovers it: link here, see pages 236-237), the cases over this four year period involve a total of just 43 people in the UK, a country where kidney beans are rather popular and which (at the time) had a total population of 55 million. Of these 43 cases, everyone recovered rapidly, and no one died.
So, let's look at these four peak years of 1976-1979, when by far the worst burst of cases occurred, and let's calculate the worst-case odds: a per-annum risk rate of 1.95 x 10 -7, or, roughly, one chance in five million.** Infinitessimal. If you were to consider the longer period of 1976-1980 (the UK study lists an addendum of another small outbreak in 1980), or if you were to consider a related paper that found and studied 50 suspected cases of toxic beans (but confirmed only nine cases) between the fourteen year period of 1976-1989, the probabilities become laughably low.
Sure, this toxin may exist. But it cannot kill you. And unless you were alive in the 1970s in the UK and lottery-winner unlucky, it can't even make you sick. It seems more probable that "kidney bean syndrome" is rooted in some other factor--perhaps some idiosyncrasy with how beans were processed in that era in the UK, or perhaps a combination of processing techniques combined with improper cooking. Most likely the real root cause is simply unknowable.
What is known, however, is this syndrome's freakish level of infrequency. Despite this, the FDA somehow manages to claim on its factsheet that "this syndrome has occurred in the United Kingdom with some regularity." Worse, the FDA page appears to make a factual error in saying "in the seven outbreaks mentioned above, the attack rate was 100%." The 1980 study is not so definitive. Finally, in the primary 1980 study, all but one of the "outbreaks" came from eating raw kidney beans.
Okay. So don't eat raw kidney beans. You never needed to be convinced of that in the first place.
This next part I want to be sure I phrase carefully. On the factsheet under #10 ("Selected Outbreaks") the FDA links to the CDC's website, which provides a search of the term phytohemagglutinin. Here, the CDC website offers two entries, except that neither involve any instance of kidney bean toxicity at all.
The first of the two entries has nothing even to do with beans--it's a rodent study of isobutyl nitrite--something completely unrelated. The second entry, "Outbreaks of Gastrointestinal Illness of Unknown Etiology Associated with Eating Burritos: United States, October 1997-October 1998" essentially says "a very small number of people got sick eating burritos, and we don't really know why, but here are some possible reasons."
Except that the document itself says kidney bean toxicity couldn't have been the reason for these illnesses. Why? Because the questionable burritos contained... pinto beans, which don't contain the toxin in the first place.
I'll state it as clearly as I can: It's one thing for the FDA to use the phrase "with some regularity" in describing a food illness as freakishly rare as kidney bean poisoning. It's another thing entirely to link to "selected outbreaks" that are not actual outbreaks.
Forget worrying about toxic beans, I'm worried about the FDA's ability to inform us appropriately about health risks.
Look, I'm no one special. I'm neither a doctor nor a scientist. And yet I was able to easily identify clear exaggerations and factual inaccuracies on a public FDA factsheet. I expect this kind of shoddy work from, say, The Food Babe's website, not the FDA. This is our own government's food and drug regulatory body--the very people who are supposed to be in charge!
What's depressing about this--to me, at least--is how much time and due diligence it takes to follow up on links cited as evidence of a given health risk, only to find that the links aren't really evidence at all. Will the average reader search out all of the linked and unlinked sources behind the FDA's worry page to see if those links support what the FDA says they support? Do you have the time to do this? No one follows all the links and reads all the studies.***
I expect more from our FDA than a scaremongering factsheet with links to outbreaks that aren't. You should too.
So. Are you looking for more and more things to worry about? Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep finding them?
Readers, what do you think?
Related Posts:
The Cure for Worry Porn
Could Toxins Be Good For You?
Four Incredibly Useful Books on Fallacy and Cognitive Bias
Understand the True Nature of Consumer Retailing
Organic Food, Chemicals, and Worrying About All the Wrong Things
When It Comes To Banning Soda, Marion Nestle Fights Dirty
Footnotes:
* Perspicacious readers will note that the FDA factsheet says two things: "The content on this page is provided for reference purposes only. This content has not been altered or updated since it was archived." and further, that there is a new version of this reference guide (the "Bad Bug Book") available. Sadly, the new text (which you can find here, see page 254 in the PDF for the text on phytohemagglutinin) is substantially the same as the old text, and most importantly, the links and errors I criticize--including the CDC link to "outbreaks that aren't"--remain extant in the document. The errors survived into the new edition and were not checked or corrected.
** I'm making an implicit and extremely conservative assumption of one serving of possibly toxic beans per person per year on average in the UK. We all know the English love their beans.
*** Readers: this brings us a highly effective technique not only to instill fear and worry, but to win any online debate: just link to tons of stuff and pretend it supports your case! The sheer weight of all those links means you win. Who cares that they don’t say what you say they say? No one will check anyway.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
--Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
***********************
Readers, there's something new to worry about. If you want to, that is.
Toxic beans.
I learned about toxic beans thanks to a comment from Mike Vrobel at Dad Cooks Dinner on my Easy White Bean Stew recipe. Mike warned readers to watch out for the toxin phytohemagglutinin, which can be found in kidney beans and certain related white beans (cannellini beans for example, which are cousins of the kidney bean). Mike helpfully directed readers to a page at the US Food and Drug Administration's website discussing details of this risk (link here).
There's an easy fix, fortunately: just boil the beans for ten minutes or more. This breaks down the toxin.
But the possible problem here lies with kidney beans cooked in a crockpot or slow cooker while using the low setting. It's theoretically possible that someone's crockpot, on a low setting, might not bring the beans quite to the boiling point, which wouldn't break down the phytohemagglutinin toxin. You might then be eating toxic beans.
Clear so far?
Now, the easiest way to eliminate any risk of food-borne illness is to cook your food properly and thoroughly. If you're concerned about your crockpot's low setting while making my Easy Bean Soup, just look in on it after a few hours. Is the soup bubbling? If it is, you're in the clear.
However, I want to go further. I want to tackle this "toxic beans" issue on its own merits. Is this really a risk that we should worry about? Because, to be honest, it smells like yet another example of we here at Casual Kitchen call worry porn.
Before we analyze the true risk of toxic beans, I want to make two points. First, this is in no way a criticism of Mike. I love Mike's work. I always enjoy his insightful writing, and I've found significant value from his book Rotisserie Grilling,
which is literally the reference guide on the subject. He's a credit to the food blog world, and I'm grateful he brought up this issue--not least because it gave me the idea for today's post.Second, in no way whatsoever am I saying that the risk of toxic beans isn't real. It is real, as we will soon see. Just rare.
Except that, well, human spontaneous combustion is real too. And also rare. So rare, in fact, that we can safely ignore it as a risk.
So really, the question is: how rare is death or illness due to improperly cooked kidney beans? Is it rare enough that we can ignore it?
Remember, we are surrounded by worries, and surrounded by a system of media designed specifically to grab our attention with worrisome things. As a result--and despite the fact that life in the modern era has never been safer--we are worrying more than ever.
So, it's up to us to choose: will we submit to every seemingly convincing fear tossed at us? (Protip: they will all sound convincing.) Or will we consider the fear rationally and disregard it if it lacks merit?
I'll give you the punchline first. With toxic beans we quickly arrive at an obvious conclusion: disregard for lack of merit.
What's sad and disturbing about this particular worry, however, is how much exaggerated and even incorrect information I found sitting, right there, on the FDA's phytohemagglutinin toxin factsheet.*
We'll get to the errors in a minute. But first, let's look at the prevalence and probabilities behind "kidney bean syndrome." The FDA cites one primary paper citing specific cases of this toxicity from the UK (see bullet point #6 on the factsheet). This study cites, for example, seven examples of "outbreaks" from 1976-1979. If you hunt down the study (a quick Google search uncovers it: link here, see pages 236-237), the cases over this four year period involve a total of just 43 people in the UK, a country where kidney beans are rather popular and which (at the time) had a total population of 55 million. Of these 43 cases, everyone recovered rapidly, and no one died.
So, let's look at these four peak years of 1976-1979, when by far the worst burst of cases occurred, and let's calculate the worst-case odds: a per-annum risk rate of 1.95 x 10 -7, or, roughly, one chance in five million.** Infinitessimal. If you were to consider the longer period of 1976-1980 (the UK study lists an addendum of another small outbreak in 1980), or if you were to consider a related paper that found and studied 50 suspected cases of toxic beans (but confirmed only nine cases) between the fourteen year period of 1976-1989, the probabilities become laughably low.
Sure, this toxin may exist. But it cannot kill you. And unless you were alive in the 1970s in the UK and lottery-winner unlucky, it can't even make you sick. It seems more probable that "kidney bean syndrome" is rooted in some other factor--perhaps some idiosyncrasy with how beans were processed in that era in the UK, or perhaps a combination of processing techniques combined with improper cooking. Most likely the real root cause is simply unknowable.
What is known, however, is this syndrome's freakish level of infrequency. Despite this, the FDA somehow manages to claim on its factsheet that "this syndrome has occurred in the United Kingdom with some regularity." Worse, the FDA page appears to make a factual error in saying "in the seven outbreaks mentioned above, the attack rate was 100%." The 1980 study is not so definitive. Finally, in the primary 1980 study, all but one of the "outbreaks" came from eating raw kidney beans.
Okay. So don't eat raw kidney beans. You never needed to be convinced of that in the first place.
This next part I want to be sure I phrase carefully. On the factsheet under #10 ("Selected Outbreaks") the FDA links to the CDC's website, which provides a search of the term phytohemagglutinin. Here, the CDC website offers two entries, except that neither involve any instance of kidney bean toxicity at all.
The first of the two entries has nothing even to do with beans--it's a rodent study of isobutyl nitrite--something completely unrelated. The second entry, "Outbreaks of Gastrointestinal Illness of Unknown Etiology Associated with Eating Burritos: United States, October 1997-October 1998" essentially says "a very small number of people got sick eating burritos, and we don't really know why, but here are some possible reasons."
Except that the document itself says kidney bean toxicity couldn't have been the reason for these illnesses. Why? Because the questionable burritos contained... pinto beans, which don't contain the toxin in the first place.
I'll state it as clearly as I can: It's one thing for the FDA to use the phrase "with some regularity" in describing a food illness as freakishly rare as kidney bean poisoning. It's another thing entirely to link to "selected outbreaks" that are not actual outbreaks.
Forget worrying about toxic beans, I'm worried about the FDA's ability to inform us appropriately about health risks.
Look, I'm no one special. I'm neither a doctor nor a scientist. And yet I was able to easily identify clear exaggerations and factual inaccuracies on a public FDA factsheet. I expect this kind of shoddy work from, say, The Food Babe's website, not the FDA. This is our own government's food and drug regulatory body--the very people who are supposed to be in charge!
What's depressing about this--to me, at least--is how much time and due diligence it takes to follow up on links cited as evidence of a given health risk, only to find that the links aren't really evidence at all. Will the average reader search out all of the linked and unlinked sources behind the FDA's worry page to see if those links support what the FDA says they support? Do you have the time to do this? No one follows all the links and reads all the studies.***
I expect more from our FDA than a scaremongering factsheet with links to outbreaks that aren't. You should too.
So. Are you looking for more and more things to worry about? Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep finding them?
Readers, what do you think?
Related Posts:
The Cure for Worry Porn
Could Toxins Be Good For You?
Four Incredibly Useful Books on Fallacy and Cognitive Bias
Understand the True Nature of Consumer Retailing
Organic Food, Chemicals, and Worrying About All the Wrong Things
When It Comes To Banning Soda, Marion Nestle Fights Dirty
Footnotes:
* Perspicacious readers will note that the FDA factsheet says two things: "The content on this page is provided for reference purposes only. This content has not been altered or updated since it was archived." and further, that there is a new version of this reference guide (the "Bad Bug Book") available. Sadly, the new text (which you can find here, see page 254 in the PDF for the text on phytohemagglutinin) is substantially the same as the old text, and most importantly, the links and errors I criticize--including the CDC link to "outbreaks that aren't"--remain extant in the document. The errors survived into the new edition and were not checked or corrected.
** I'm making an implicit and extremely conservative assumption of one serving of possibly toxic beans per person per year on average in the UK. We all know the English love their beans.
*** Readers: this brings us a highly effective technique not only to instill fear and worry, but to win any online debate: just link to tons of stuff and pretend it supports your case! The sheer weight of all those links means you win. Who cares that they don’t say what you say they say? No one will check anyway.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Yoga Mats, Subway, and the Azodicarbonamide Controversy: Chemical Phobia In the Media Age
Readers, an intriguing event happened in the world of fear-based media over the past two weeks. Subway, the sandwich chain, caved to a food blogger, Food Babe, who demanded that the chain eliminate azodicarbonamide from its bread products. How did she manage to do it? In part by pointing out that azodicarbonamide, which Subway uses as a dough oxidizer, is also an ingredient used in making plastic yoga mats.
You read that right: yoga mats.
This isn't the first time Food Babe criticized Subway, but it's the first time she got serious traction doing so. Back in 2012, she wrote Is Subway Real Food?, a discouragingly unscientific critique of the preservatives and food additives Subway uses to prevent food spoilage. Then, in late 2013, she wrote her first post about azodicarbonamide where she appears to confuse industrial-scale use of the compound with food-grade uses. However, it wasn't until she created her Subway petition two weeks ago, with the exquisite slogan we want to really eat fresh, not yoga mat--that this issue caught fire.
Let's set aside for the moment the phobia that drives otherwise reasonably intelligent people to fear any chemical with more than four syllables. Instead, let's ask: is this controversy on azodicarbonamide a real controversy?
Unfortunately, this is the wrong question. If enough people think a controversy is real, it becomes real.
Subway must protect its brand, so it will replace the ingredient to avoid losing business. Simple. Management just had to decide at what point the issue became serious enough to justify the change. Whether azodicarbonamide is safe or not is irrelevant.
Of course there's another issue here: why would a food blogger who would fit right in with early 1900's muckrakers, who fancies herself the leader of an army, and who even implausibly takes credit for Chik-fil-A's decision to go antibiotic-free engage in a passive-aggressive attempt to tell a company how to bake bread?
Don't get me wrong: Vani The Food Babe seems like a lovely person. She may use hyperbole and a lot of exclamation points, but she clearly cares deeply about what's in our food. And admittedly, the yoga mat idea is utter genius. That said, however, if you carefully analyze the rhetoric she uses--and the logic she doesn't--it is impossible to distinguish her fear-mongering posts from my parody post on the dangers of coffee. Try it. Read her articles on azodicarbonamide and then read A Cup of Morning Death? and see if you can identify any difference in the caliber of argument.
But what this brings us back to is how it is all too easy to worry about all the wrong things. Penn State food science professor John Coupland framed the issue quite well on his blog:
"[F]ood companies are desperate to appeal to consumer demand and as this case shows they can and will change fast. Campaign smartly though. This campaign was successful not because of a serious consideration of risk but because of the jarring incongruity of a compound being in bread and in plastic. Lots of compounds crop up in lots of places and this is a weak argument for deciding which uses are appropriate. It is I suppose possible that there will be a public health benefit from eliminating this ingredient but not much actual evidence."
As with all "chemicals" it's the dose that makes the toxin. Hey, even dihydrogen monoxide* is fatal if inhaled or consumed to excess.
Look, I can't quantify the potential hazards of Subway's 9-Grain Wheat. Nor can people with far more expertise. But I'd guess with a great degree of confidence that I expose myself to much more risk by driving to my local Subway than by eating their bread.
Bottom line: life has never been safer, yet inexplicably, we're more fearful than ever.
Readers, what do you think?
* Otherwise known as water.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
You read that right: yoga mats.
This isn't the first time Food Babe criticized Subway, but it's the first time she got serious traction doing so. Back in 2012, she wrote Is Subway Real Food?, a discouragingly unscientific critique of the preservatives and food additives Subway uses to prevent food spoilage. Then, in late 2013, she wrote her first post about azodicarbonamide where she appears to confuse industrial-scale use of the compound with food-grade uses. However, it wasn't until she created her Subway petition two weeks ago, with the exquisite slogan we want to really eat fresh, not yoga mat--that this issue caught fire.
Let's set aside for the moment the phobia that drives otherwise reasonably intelligent people to fear any chemical with more than four syllables. Instead, let's ask: is this controversy on azodicarbonamide a real controversy?
Unfortunately, this is the wrong question. If enough people think a controversy is real, it becomes real.
Subway must protect its brand, so it will replace the ingredient to avoid losing business. Simple. Management just had to decide at what point the issue became serious enough to justify the change. Whether azodicarbonamide is safe or not is irrelevant.
Of course there's another issue here: why would a food blogger who would fit right in with early 1900's muckrakers, who fancies herself the leader of an army, and who even implausibly takes credit for Chik-fil-A's decision to go antibiotic-free engage in a passive-aggressive attempt to tell a company how to bake bread?
Don't get me wrong: Vani The Food Babe seems like a lovely person. She may use hyperbole and a lot of exclamation points, but she clearly cares deeply about what's in our food. And admittedly, the yoga mat idea is utter genius. That said, however, if you carefully analyze the rhetoric she uses--and the logic she doesn't--it is impossible to distinguish her fear-mongering posts from my parody post on the dangers of coffee. Try it. Read her articles on azodicarbonamide and then read A Cup of Morning Death? and see if you can identify any difference in the caliber of argument.
But what this brings us back to is how it is all too easy to worry about all the wrong things. Penn State food science professor John Coupland framed the issue quite well on his blog:
"[F]ood companies are desperate to appeal to consumer demand and as this case shows they can and will change fast. Campaign smartly though. This campaign was successful not because of a serious consideration of risk but because of the jarring incongruity of a compound being in bread and in plastic. Lots of compounds crop up in lots of places and this is a weak argument for deciding which uses are appropriate. It is I suppose possible that there will be a public health benefit from eliminating this ingredient but not much actual evidence."
As with all "chemicals" it's the dose that makes the toxin. Hey, even dihydrogen monoxide* is fatal if inhaled or consumed to excess.
Look, I can't quantify the potential hazards of Subway's 9-Grain Wheat. Nor can people with far more expertise. But I'd guess with a great degree of confidence that I expose myself to much more risk by driving to my local Subway than by eating their bread.
Bottom line: life has never been safer, yet inexplicably, we're more fearful than ever.
Readers, what do you think?
* Otherwise known as water.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Plummeting Highway Fatalities: More Cures For Worry Porn
Perhaps some of you have seen this striking video of a test collision between a 1959 Chevy Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu while it was making the rounds on Facebook over the past few days:
[Alternate link, with commentary, here]
Astonishing, isn't it? It's very easy to caricature modern cars as flimsy and liable to disintegrate at the least provocation. That’s of course until you realize that modern cars are designed that way to protect the driver--a fact painfully driven home when you see how pathetically the crash test dummy in the 1959 car fares compared to the 2009 dummy. My face hurts just thinking about that poor dummy in the 1959 car.
Here's some data to think about: Highway deaths in the USA peaked in 1972 at 54,000 a year.[1] Today, total highway deaths have declined from this peak level by about a third.
Now, "down by a third" might seem at first like a meh datapoint, until you realize that, today, we have a 50% larger population and we drive two and a half times more miles per person than in 1972. In other words, on a per-capita basis highway deaths are only a third of what they were then, and on a per-miles-driven basis they are only a fourth of what they were. Here's a chart that drives home the point (click to bigify):
Not only that, but cars today are far more fuel efficient, far less polluting and far better built. This should particularly resonate with you if, like me, you grew up in the seventies, riding with your siblings in the "back-in-the-back" of rusted-out station wagons. With fashionable simulated wood grain paneling.
Today, when you get into your car and drive somewhere, your risk of death is now, roughly, 1/4 what it was in 1972, and down 95% since the 1920s. And yet we worry about things like bisphenol A in the linings of our canned food.
One again, in an era when it’s never been safer to be alive, it's all too easy to worry about all the wrong things.
For further reading:
Wikipedia data on highway fatalities
[1] Another way to put these statistics in (sobering) context: The United States lost 58,000 soldiers over the entire 13+ years of the Vietnam War--a terrible tragedy. Yet during the war we were losing almost that many people every year in traffic accidents.
Related Posts:
Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases
What Is a Scarcity Mindset? Investing and Living In a Zero Sum Paradigm
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands
How Food Blogs Disempower Their Readers
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
[Alternate link, with commentary, here]
Astonishing, isn't it? It's very easy to caricature modern cars as flimsy and liable to disintegrate at the least provocation. That’s of course until you realize that modern cars are designed that way to protect the driver--a fact painfully driven home when you see how pathetically the crash test dummy in the 1959 car fares compared to the 2009 dummy. My face hurts just thinking about that poor dummy in the 1959 car.
Here's some data to think about: Highway deaths in the USA peaked in 1972 at 54,000 a year.[1] Today, total highway deaths have declined from this peak level by about a third.
Now, "down by a third" might seem at first like a meh datapoint, until you realize that, today, we have a 50% larger population and we drive two and a half times more miles per person than in 1972. In other words, on a per-capita basis highway deaths are only a third of what they were then, and on a per-miles-driven basis they are only a fourth of what they were. Here's a chart that drives home the point (click to bigify):
Not only that, but cars today are far more fuel efficient, far less polluting and far better built. This should particularly resonate with you if, like me, you grew up in the seventies, riding with your siblings in the "back-in-the-back" of rusted-out station wagons. With fashionable simulated wood grain paneling.
Today, when you get into your car and drive somewhere, your risk of death is now, roughly, 1/4 what it was in 1972, and down 95% since the 1920s. And yet we worry about things like bisphenol A in the linings of our canned food.
One again, in an era when it’s never been safer to be alive, it's all too easy to worry about all the wrong things.
For further reading:
Wikipedia data on highway fatalities
[1] Another way to put these statistics in (sobering) context: The United States lost 58,000 soldiers over the entire 13+ years of the Vietnam War--a terrible tragedy. Yet during the war we were losing almost that many people every year in traffic accidents.
Related Posts:
Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases
What Is a Scarcity Mindset? Investing and Living In a Zero Sum Paradigm
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands
How Food Blogs Disempower Their Readers
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The Cure for Worry Porn
1) Wait, you're using a Teflon pan? Haven't you heard of the serious risks of PFOA?
2) Vaccines will give my child autism!
3) "A new link between grilling meats and cancer..."
4) Aren't you worried about Bisphenol-A in the linings of your canned food?
5) Have you heard about the link between acrylamide and cancer? You can get cancer now from burnt toast!
In the modern media era, we are literally buried by the above kind of "information." We all have friends who post alarming articles on Facebook, or friends who send us chain emails loaded with concerns like these. And of course, we're constantly exposed to major news media outlets carrying authoritative-sounding articles based on scientific studies... studies that somehow always seem to discover a link between a perfectly reasonable everyday activity and some dreaded disease.
Readers, this is not information. It is just another form of pornography. It isn't meant to inform you, it's meant to stimulate your limbic system. It's designed to produce fear and worry (hence the term "worry porn"), so you'll click, read, or just sit there and keep watching.
Fear is a hindbrain reaction. Our forebrains just follow along. Whatever article we happen to be reading merely has to seem persuasive--which is laughably easy as most readers lack basic critical thinking skills.
Voilà: we believe the fear is real and worth worrying about.
And yet this information is never worth worrying about. To see why, allow me to share five rules I keep in mind whenever I stumble onto worry porn:
Rule 1: The studies we see are the most outlandish or the most fear-inducing.
This is a basic and fundamental concept of the media. Fear sells and surprise sells. Further, the more media you consume, the more it seems normal to read about fear and surprise, to the point where it begins to skew your own perception of reality. Incidentally, this is why, in an era when life has never been safer for human beings, we all feel like life is more dangerous than ever.
Rule 2: A tiny fraction of studies are independently replicated.
A study that "proves" something actually proves nothing until somebody else can come up with the same findings separately. This almost never happens, but you'd never know it judging by the way the media covers scientific issues. The general media is interested in selling you information that surprises or scares you, it is not interested in running follow up stories on how such-and-such study couldn't be replicated by anyone else.
Rule 3: Even when the results of a study are replicated, the size or strength of the effect is smaller--usually significantly smaller--than the findings of the original study.
It's not enough that we're unable to replicate most studies. Even when when we do replicate results, the linkage is almost always far weaker than the original findings. This is known as the Decline Effect, and it's been confounding researchers for decades. Taken to its logical conclusion, the Decline Effect suggests that there is some other unknown form of bias--statistical bias, survivor bias, medical journal bias, perhaps even political bias--at work that skews the fundamental nature of scientific studies.
Rule 4: No one sees the studies that say "this chemical is safe," "this pattern of behavior is safe" or "we postulated this link between burnt toast and cancer but didn't find anything."
This is known as the File Drawer Effect: Studies that don't prove anything or studies that produce negative findings tend to vanish into the journal editor's file drawer without getting published. Why? Readers should know the answer by heart by now: If there's no fear involved, no one will read it.
Rule 5: Therefore, any fears you have after hearing about any study, ever, are overblown.
Thinking about scientific studies this way is immensely freeing, not to mention a lot less fear-inducing.
But that's the funny thing about fear: if you have a fear, you can't really ask me or anyone else to save you from your fear. Your fear is a feeling. It can't be disproven. You have to decide yourself whether you will submit to your fear or not.
Once you wrap your mind around what worry porn really is, you'll be able to look at this information in an entirely new way. You will no longer worry. You'll recognize that this information is presented against backdrop of fear, and it's designed for one reason and one reason only: to keep you reading, watching and listening.
Readers, what do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.
A quick footnote: One more thing. I'd like to briefly review perhaps the worst example of worry-porn ever. Why do so many people harbor an irrational fear that vaccines cause autism? It all stems from an extremely famous study that supposedly found a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
This study got a lot of publicity. A lot. After all, there's nothing more fear inducing than the idea that we could be deliberately harming our very own children. And this study scared millions of parents away from vaccinating their kids.
And that study? It turns out that the data was faked, the study was fraudulent and the author was barred permanently from practicing medicine.
Leaving us with no facts, no study, just fear. Which is incredibly sad, because there are now thousands of children contracting measles in perfectly modern developing countries, thanks to fears spread by a false study. There was a measles outbreak in Scotland--Scotland!--just last April while I was there visiting.
Thus now we're facing outbreaks of a dangerous childhood disease that should already be conquered. Keep this example in mind the next time you can't resist clicking on some article that says "A new study suggests a link between...."
For further reading:
1) The Truth Wears Off - a well-written article on the Decline Effect in the New Yorker
2) Publication Bias (including thoughts on the File Drawer Effect) at Wikipedia
3) The Decline Effect Is Stupid - a critique of the above New Yorker article at The Last Psychiatrist
4) "Wakefield’s article linking the MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent" - a short and useful summary at the British Medical Journal Online on the autism/vaccine fraud.
5) Fifteen Years After Autism Panic, a Plague of Measles Erupts - Sobering article on the unintended consequences of worrying about all the wrong things.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
2) Vaccines will give my child autism!
3) "A new link between grilling meats and cancer..."
4) Aren't you worried about Bisphenol-A in the linings of your canned food?
5) Have you heard about the link between acrylamide and cancer? You can get cancer now from burnt toast!
In the modern media era, we are literally buried by the above kind of "information." We all have friends who post alarming articles on Facebook, or friends who send us chain emails loaded with concerns like these. And of course, we're constantly exposed to major news media outlets carrying authoritative-sounding articles based on scientific studies... studies that somehow always seem to discover a link between a perfectly reasonable everyday activity and some dreaded disease.
Readers, this is not information. It is just another form of pornography. It isn't meant to inform you, it's meant to stimulate your limbic system. It's designed to produce fear and worry (hence the term "worry porn"), so you'll click, read, or just sit there and keep watching.
Fear is a hindbrain reaction. Our forebrains just follow along. Whatever article we happen to be reading merely has to seem persuasive--which is laughably easy as most readers lack basic critical thinking skills.
Voilà: we believe the fear is real and worth worrying about.
And yet this information is never worth worrying about. To see why, allow me to share five rules I keep in mind whenever I stumble onto worry porn:
Rule 1: The studies we see are the most outlandish or the most fear-inducing.
This is a basic and fundamental concept of the media. Fear sells and surprise sells. Further, the more media you consume, the more it seems normal to read about fear and surprise, to the point where it begins to skew your own perception of reality. Incidentally, this is why, in an era when life has never been safer for human beings, we all feel like life is more dangerous than ever.
Rule 2: A tiny fraction of studies are independently replicated.
A study that "proves" something actually proves nothing until somebody else can come up with the same findings separately. This almost never happens, but you'd never know it judging by the way the media covers scientific issues. The general media is interested in selling you information that surprises or scares you, it is not interested in running follow up stories on how such-and-such study couldn't be replicated by anyone else.
Rule 3: Even when the results of a study are replicated, the size or strength of the effect is smaller--usually significantly smaller--than the findings of the original study.
It's not enough that we're unable to replicate most studies. Even when when we do replicate results, the linkage is almost always far weaker than the original findings. This is known as the Decline Effect, and it's been confounding researchers for decades. Taken to its logical conclusion, the Decline Effect suggests that there is some other unknown form of bias--statistical bias, survivor bias, medical journal bias, perhaps even political bias--at work that skews the fundamental nature of scientific studies.
Rule 4: No one sees the studies that say "this chemical is safe," "this pattern of behavior is safe" or "we postulated this link between burnt toast and cancer but didn't find anything."
This is known as the File Drawer Effect: Studies that don't prove anything or studies that produce negative findings tend to vanish into the journal editor's file drawer without getting published. Why? Readers should know the answer by heart by now: If there's no fear involved, no one will read it.
Rule 5: Therefore, any fears you have after hearing about any study, ever, are overblown.
Thinking about scientific studies this way is immensely freeing, not to mention a lot less fear-inducing.
But that's the funny thing about fear: if you have a fear, you can't really ask me or anyone else to save you from your fear. Your fear is a feeling. It can't be disproven. You have to decide yourself whether you will submit to your fear or not.
Once you wrap your mind around what worry porn really is, you'll be able to look at this information in an entirely new way. You will no longer worry. You'll recognize that this information is presented against backdrop of fear, and it's designed for one reason and one reason only: to keep you reading, watching and listening.
Readers, what do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.
A quick footnote: One more thing. I'd like to briefly review perhaps the worst example of worry-porn ever. Why do so many people harbor an irrational fear that vaccines cause autism? It all stems from an extremely famous study that supposedly found a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
This study got a lot of publicity. A lot. After all, there's nothing more fear inducing than the idea that we could be deliberately harming our very own children. And this study scared millions of parents away from vaccinating their kids.
And that study? It turns out that the data was faked, the study was fraudulent and the author was barred permanently from practicing medicine.
Leaving us with no facts, no study, just fear. Which is incredibly sad, because there are now thousands of children contracting measles in perfectly modern developing countries, thanks to fears spread by a false study. There was a measles outbreak in Scotland--Scotland!--just last April while I was there visiting.
Thus now we're facing outbreaks of a dangerous childhood disease that should already be conquered. Keep this example in mind the next time you can't resist clicking on some article that says "A new study suggests a link between...."
For further reading:
1) The Truth Wears Off - a well-written article on the Decline Effect in the New Yorker
2) Publication Bias (including thoughts on the File Drawer Effect) at Wikipedia
3) The Decline Effect Is Stupid - a critique of the above New Yorker article at The Last Psychiatrist
4) "Wakefield’s article linking the MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent" - a short and useful summary at the British Medical Journal Online on the autism/vaccine fraud.
5) Fifteen Years After Autism Panic, a Plague of Measles Erupts - Sobering article on the unintended consequences of worrying about all the wrong things.
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