Research Abuse: How the Food and Drug Industries Pull the Wool Over Your Eyes by Ralf Sundberg

Author:Ralf Sundberg [Sundberg, Ralf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781665581134
Amazon: 1665581131
Publisher: Authorhouse
Published: 2020-10-18T18:30:00+00:00

* Milk products including butter.

** Milk products (other than butter) containing fat minus skim milk.

The research team chose, for reasons not apparent to the reader, to conceal a possible correlation between fatty dairy products and reduced mortality in cardiac disease.

How to mislead using statistics on a large scale

A far more clever way to mislead by using epidemiological statistics is to exclude from the very beginning subjects carrying the risk one is studying. In this way, one can conceal risk factors one does not wish to admit exist. One reads in the studies that only healthy individuals were chosen to participate. It’s likely that a greater number of test subjects than those presented were studied, but data are published only from a hand-picked subgroup. Those who exhibited signs of the disease from the start, or factors that lead to it, could then conveniently be eliminated. As a result, the test group does not represent persons who suffer a heart attack at an early age, but rather those who will be stricken decades later. In this way, we lose data from patients with the most important risk factors for disease-related early death, which reasonably should be the most important thing to look into. This way, though, the research data and their presentation can more easily be adapted to the client’s wishes, whether it’s a government health institution or a margarine producer. We no longer draw curves, erase lines, and move data points closer to the curve we want to fit. Nowadays, we have fast computers and sophisticated software. With their help, one can bend and twist numbers to obtain a result that supports a specific theory, if one is inclined to be dishonest and chooses to be so. It’s just a lot faster than it used to be.

As in the Framingham study, subjects who already showed symptoms of the disease being studied were excluded. If that’s not enough, one can also exclude subjects with other medical conditions that increase the risk of contracting or dying of the disease.

Apropos of the risk of having a heart attack or dying of one, it is well known that a large majority of those who are stricken have diabetes or early stages of diabetes. The risk of high blood pressure also increases, primarily an indication of stress, and perhaps a low-fat diet is followed. High consumption of fast carbohydrates is associated with these risk factors.

In this way, the epidemiologist/statistician can push a few buttons and, whenever he or she wishes to, eliminate subjects with diagnosed heart disease. Then, if the desired result is not reached, the researcher may even eliminate diabetics and subjects with early diabetes symptoms according to a specific lab test. Maybe the researcher decides to eliminate subjects with high blood pressure as well. There are nuances in between.

One can eliminate those who are taking medication for certain ailments, although this is not so common. One can even eliminate those who report consuming more or fewer calories than what is regarded as normal. The reader of the finished article will not ponder at length on how this was done.

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