Fructose, Bayes’s Theorem, Hill’s criteria and Murphy’s Law — Richard Feinman, Ph.D. (AHS14)
Channel: AncestryFoundation
Date: 2014-08-24

The current interest in fructose provides an opportunity to study metabolism and allows us to ask what clues about ancestral behavior are evident in current pathways. When considering the threat to paleo from the exaggeration in fructose, we have to consider all the other threats from the nutritional literature and there is the opportunity to discuss how we can read that literature. I describe Bradford Hill’s criteria for when an association can be taken as causal as in Hill’s deduction of the link between cigarette smoke and lung cancer. The failure of the current literature to conform to his criteria suggests that the cigarette-cancer link is not only the classic case of effective use of epidemiology but may be the only case. I also describe Bayes’s theorem which points out how statistics is about beliefs and expectation and how each failure of trials of the diet-heart hypothesis should have raised the stakes on the next and, in the end, how foolish meta-analyses are. On the positive side, I offer our previously published matrix method as a good way to present dat in dietary trials. And finally, any thing that can go wrong in nutritional studies, can be shown to be correct anyway with statistics.

Abstracts and information about the Ancestral Health Symposium can be found at www.ancestralhealth.org/ahs14-program.