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> What evidence is there that people in this study might have been lying? People tend to systematically misreport food intake (eg https://academic.oup.com/jn/a
by jamii 8y ago
> What evidence is there that people in this study might have been lying?
People tend to systematically misreport food intake (eg https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/133/3/895S/4688054 https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/133/3/895S/4688054).
People are really bad at estimating portion sizes (eg https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812565 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812...).
If you run a non-blinded experiment using a self-reported measure that is well known to be wildly misreported and only get a small effect size to boot, it's on you to prove that you actually affected behavior and not just reporting.
- dahart 8y agoI totally buy both of those claims (and thanks for the sources!), but I don’t see how that necessarily affects this study. The human bias is (unsurprisingly) toward under-reporting consumption in both studies you cite. People aren’t randomly inaccurate, they are consistently underestimating. The self control study showed a decrease in reported consumption, so it doesn’t matter if people under-report food intake or portion sizes, what matters is the numbers went down anyway, right? The bias is present before, during, and after the self control study.