Science strikes again

[stealthflower]

*sighs* The wonders of scientific enquiry. A study in the current issue of the Nutrition Journal has observed young women over ten years, and measured vitamin C levels in the blood as well as blood pressure.

They've found that the higher the blood levels of vitamin C, the healthier their blood pressure tends to be, which is all well and good.

They

Comments

[peculia]

Hehe ... science.

I knew some physicists once. Lovely, ridiculously smart bunch of chaps, but their common sense levels were on a par with, say, that of gravel.

[stealthflower]

Yeah. It's the waste that irritates me; that and the number of people who are going to be convinced that taking C will fix their blood pressure.

[peculia]

Mmmmmmm ... snakeoil.

[stealthflower]

Mmm. There's nothing wrong with Vitamin C; just with dubious science.

[random_llama]

wait, they did adjust for dietary levels of fat and sodium as well as BMI. While that isn't as good as adjusting for adjusting for everything they ate you could argue that they are an adequate proxy for good diet.

I also notice that they did 3 day dietary records so it's not like they didn't collect the information. It's possible that they didn't want to over adjust and found that fat and sodium were the only significant confounders in the model...

[stealthflower]

Fat and sodium aren't really a good marker for things like fibre and antioxidant consumption, though. They don't talk about fruit and veg intake as confounders - or not that I can see anyway, so we can't really conclude that fat and sodium are the only significant confounders.

[matoko]

I love it when you guys talk science.

[random_llama]

Well that's true and they don't talk about why they left it out because I'm pretty sure that they could estimate those things from a 3 day food diary.

[sly_girl]

The vitamin C study did not take part over 10 years, just in the 10th year of the study. What's more, since the women only checked in annually, it would have been hard to monitor diet throughout the interval.

[stealthflower]

Yes, it would have been hard to monitor diet, although there are tools for estimating it - random_llama would know them better than me. My point isn't that it's hard, it's that claiming that vitamin C is the causative factor here is unjustified.

*shrugs*

[random_llama]

Actually they did do a measurement that could effectively estimate diet, it's a little baffling as to why they didn't include it in their statistical model.