This is a new observational study that looked at mothers who drank more caffeine and then checked 8 years later to see if their kids were overweight
-
-
Show this thread
-
They found that - shocker! - mothers who drank more caffeine had heavier 8-year-olds
Show this thread -
BUT they also found that mothers who drank more caffeine were WAAAAAY less healthy in other ways toopic.twitter.com/WwrrSB6I62
Show this thread -
I've talked about this before. If your comparison group in an observational trial is much, much less healthy, even controlling for confounders might not matter muchhttps://medium.com/the-method/diet-drinks-arent-killing-you-54c9e5d06c30 …
Show this thread -
You can control for everything you know about, but there's always going to be things that you don't measure, or just don't know
Show this thread -
So it's quite likely that: a) there is an underlying cause (perhaps socio-economic - imagine that!) causing these children to gain weight, or b) the observed association is true, but much smaller than this study suggests
Show this thread -
So does drinking caffeine during pregnancy make babies fatter? Perhaps. It's probably not ideal. Does this study show that? Definitely not
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.