With the right training manuals we could build an army of super-soldiers!
Anyone know who funded this study?
US National Science Foundation. From the original paper (open access journal):
This material is based upon work supported by the NSF GRFP [Graduate Fellowship Research Program] under Grant No. (NSF 16-588).
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As a type 1 diabetic I can tell you exactly how hidden sugar and carb acts on my blood glucose. Every new restaurant meal is a game of russian roulette.
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It’s my beautiful dream that media outlets would stop credulously sharing bullshit studies like this. Thousands of people are now going to file away the “factoid” that your state of mind affects your blood sugar. They will tell their friends about it and their friends will think it is true. Just like that, the world has gotten stupider.
Here are some actual facts:
- Tiny sample size
- Poor controls
- Nature took down the article
Nothing is true until it has been demonstrated with large sample sizes using strong controls and proper statistical methods,and it has been replicated by others
You can “demonstrate” just about any imaginable effect you want with 30 undergrads in a crappy psych lab with no controls.
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That’s the amount of sugar in the final dry weight. It’s something like five times the allowable amount and therefore the sandwiches aren’t legally classified as “food” but “confectionery” for tax purposes, etc.
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Whatever the problems with this particular study, I have seen references to other research that suggested something similar/the same. So this very well could be a real phenomenon. However, there’s also the gulf between “what the research says” and “how it’s popularly presented” being a huge problem, regardless of how good the research is.
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Ah, thanks for the clarification. I should have read the article. 
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Totally. There isn’t anything wrong with preliminary studies. It’s how we start- do a small trial, see if it’s promising, then start tightening controls, looking for causalities, scaling up etc. All part of science.
The problem is that the media jumps on these early studies and proclaims sweeping conclusions from them that usually aren’t at all supported by the data. This is not all the fault of media, either. University PR departments have made this worse, and “open access” (ie. nonsense) “journals” have muddied the waters about what is a trustworthy source.
All of this is x10 with Psychology because it’s notoriously rife with tiny effect sizes, p-hacking, unreproducability, and clickbait headlines.
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Where did you find this? It was never published in Nature. Scientific Reports is a journal from the Nature publishing group, but much less prestigious- all articles published there are peer reviewed, but they don’t reject based on low impact on the field. I can’t find any reference to this article being retracted from Scientific Reports or anywhere else- please do link if you can find a retraction notice.
The same group published an article a few years ago in the rather more prestigious PNAS, saying that they had found that perception of time passing played a more important role than actual time passing in determining blood sugar levels of people with Type 2 diabetes.
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I never said it was retracted in the scientific sense of that word. The link in the pop-science site linked in the BoingBoing post to the original study is broken and goes to Nature’s 404. So I went to the journal’s site to search for it. It appears in the search results, but when you click the summary it again 404s on Nature.
So clearly the article was posted there at some point because the summary is cached in the search engine, but now appears to be gone.
All of this goes back to my original point- nobody read any deeper than some ad-infested pop-science site’s summary of the study. Catchy headline? Repost!
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If it works for him and he’s able to keep on top of it? Yes.
Bog knows I don’t take B/G readings nearly as often as what others think I should, because frankly, it stresses me out, and that’s about as bad.
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And not just early studies, either - though those are routinely misrepresented - it’s interesting to look at studies that have really permeated into the popular culture (e.g. the “right-brain/left-brain” research, most of the best-known psychology studies) and realize that in some cases absolutely none of the popular understanding is supported by the results of the study - and in some case the study indicated the opposite of what everyone believes about it.
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The link from the pop science site still works for me (even after clearing my cache). I can also find it on the journal website by entering the authors’ names in the search bar.
I don’t know what’s happening at your end to make it look like it’s been taken down…
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Okay , so it was a temporary glitch perhaps. So what? It doesn’t change anything about my larger point. You’re clearly more interested in feeling right about something than engaging in an interesting conversation, so I officially award you 10 Internet Man Points. Please go away now, you are tedious.
Laid-back management works well for a lot of people with Type II diabetes, especially older people who don’t really need to worry about complications 20 years down the road. The downside to really tight blood sugar control (besides the anxiety) is the elevated risk of low blood sugar events that can kill you quick. But unfortunately my dad doesn’t really manage his diabetes at all and really avoids learning anything about how to do so. The other day he was like, “Oh, do you think sugar is a carbohydrate?” not at all sarcastically. For diabetic person with a post-graduate level education, that shows some real powers of denial.
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