I have had conversations with various people over the last 2 years while being keto. If I get someone interested in debating the science, they will invariably provide some article from the NIH (or some other resource) whose data is based on food-frequency questionnaires or some such (i.e., observational stucy). We all know observational studies are not the gold standard and can be inaccurate at times. But it is hard to debate this with individuals as they don’t necessarily understand the difference between observational study and a clinical trial.
As an example, I’d like to use this study as an example:
When someone provides a study like the above, I try to search for this study in these forums to find out the current info debating the merits of the study and what the conclusions were. When I try to search for the title of this study (Dietary fat intake and risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality in a population at high risk of cardiovascular disease) I get two results that point to articles that happen to contain some combination of those words. Using quotes gets me no articles (maybe this one will show up in future results). I try to search for the URL to the article but still nothing.
What I’d like to propose is that we have a way to access a canonical article about a specific paper. The article should be:
Searchable by the study title
Searchable by the study link(s)
Searchable by the author(s)
Summary of article results
Discussions/Argument for/against papers with reasons why the original paper is good/bad science
Contain links to
Papers with opposing/concurring results
Papers supporting discussions/arguments from above
All links to other papers should include a link to a discussion on this forum to a page that discusses that paper (if it exists)
Each article can have a healthy discussion but the summaries should be added to the original post (as a wiki) so that people don’t have to scroll through the whole discussion to get a feeling for what the group feels. (This could be a little contentious as people have different opinions but we would/should provide different viewpoints in the original summary.)
Obviously, I’m likely missing a bunch of additional things that would be useful to have on these summary. Please make suggestions if you have any thoughts.
Would this be helpful or is something like this already happening and I’m not seeing it?
I’m really curious on what others think about this proposal, especially the moderators (Including @richard and @carl).
I normally get receive these articles in an email with just a link for me to look at. What I’d like to do is either provide a link back to the ketogencforum for the summary article with a full discussion on the article or copy and paste the salient info in the email to send back to the originator.
You and I may think that but the uninformed masses think that since that study is posted at the NIH, it must have merit and therefore it trumps any keto argument. I, and I assume others, would like some place to have some reasonable, well authored discussion of why the article has no merits. In other words, “What are its flaws?”
I just reply with, “and how has that been working out, and based on the results it must be correct” . I know does not address your desire to talk about the science, however I find most that bring this stuff up have no desire to open there mind so I do not have the conversation and in 6 months like the look on there face when I have dropped 105 more body weight.
