A recent report asserted that up to 50% of research paper results are wrong. I'm sure that, at the very least, Michael Fumento will say this is one of them. Actually two of them. One paper found no link between vending machine use in high schools and obesity; another found no link between portion size and obesity.
The first paper ("Frequency of School Vending Machine Purchases, BMI and Diet Quality") looked at the frequent claim, made most recently by the Terminator, that school vending machines are responsible for making kids fat and should be banned.... The subjects were 552 high school students who were surveyed about their diet quality, including total calories, total fat, saturated fat, total carbohydrates and sugar, and their vending machine purchases. <snip> But what was really interesting was that there were no differences in BMI percentile or in calories between the four groups. In other words, contrary to the claims of those who blame school vending machines for childhood obesity, vending machine purchases did not make a difference to the student's calorie intake or to their BMI. As the authors conclude the "Results suggests that frequency of purchase from school vending machines was not associated with BMI percentile or DQ [Diet Quality]."
The second study looks at another of the popular obesity claims, namely that the portion sizes offered by restaurants make people fat...What they found was that portion size made no difference in the amount of food consumed. Participants who had received large portions did not eat more food than participants who had received small portions, even though their portion contained five times more food. The availability of the extra food did not influence total consumption. As the authors note "There was no effect of portion size" which "suggests that smaller portions did not influence intake...."
No comments:
Post a Comment