The study was a bit of a headache to unravel, but despite the confusing writing the design seems relatively simple: People were randomized to either get breakfast before or after they played a dice game
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Instead, it seems almost certain that the original study just looked at lying in fasted vs breakfasted people We can actually see this even more clearly because they ran 36 people through the entire procedure only to exclude them after the fact!pic.twitter.com/YcaJhAfNFh
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This starts to get a bit murky, because I cannot find a pre-registration for the study That's worrying, because changing your hypothesis after running a study is a classic sign of p-hacking
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Another sign is the statistical analysis. I count upwards of 100 comparisons (Fisher's exact test, chi squared etc) with no correction for multiple comparisons That's...worrying
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If you apply a Bonferroni correction to the results, pretty much every statistically significant finding completely disappears, which is not surprising given that they ran SO MANY tests
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Bringing it back home, we have this sentence in the discussion According to supplementary table 4, this simply isn't true!pic.twitter.com/zNm5GfENI8
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Obese people had differences in behaviour, but the statistical comparisons DIDN'T SHOW A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE Pretty major issue, that
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Anyway, the paper is abhorrent regardless, but I think it also shows some worrying signs of being constructed after the fact from a dataset of a trial with different aims
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Oh, another issue - the paper makes an inherently misleading claim about causality. The primary findings were of a subgroup analysis of non-randomized groups (lean vs obese) and so it's not clear whether this was causal anyway
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Because the randomization was simply fasted vs breakfast, the causal attribution for this study should be comparing those two groups, not the subgroups of obese vs lean
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End of conversation
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And alpha of 0.5??
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