Evaluating Scientific Studies

[Trusylver]

You see a lot of wild claims related to the health and fitness industry, most have no science to back them at all, however a few people provide what they think are good studies to back their case, most of which are sponsored by the company producing the product they happen to be trying to sell, in most other cases the science is just bad or even fraudulent on purpose, especially some studies which make it big in the media, and of course so many people do so little fact checking themselves (including journalists) that completely fake science can suddenly become common knowledge that "must be true"

 

[PLB_old]

Thanks for posting this. It's really important to remind people to fact check and be sceptical of what they hear in the news or see on the internet!

 

[Trusylver]

I would also like to add to this

If you make a claim you should make an effort to back your claim with evidence, "The big guy at the gym told me" is not valid evidence. Neither is a link to a supplement site. Ideally evidence would be a link to a peer reviewed scientific paper.

 

[agomez]

We see three questions - yet in those cases that are not biased by interest -

1) the problems are not well defined.
2) there is a incomplete knowledge of math and statistics, so many experiments are bad defined and the data are incorrectly processed.
3) when people wants apply the results, make this in another context.

I wrote this in the spanish forum https://www.fitness.com/es/forum/threads/como-interpretar-estudios-estadisticos.785732/
https://www.fitness.com/es/forum/threads/ciencia-seudo-ciencia-intuicion-y-empirismo.1946254/