Wow, motte and bailey. Hengist et al publish a toy paper where they fed 14 guys pizza and ran a blood panel. Sure, why not. Probably took an afternoon, and was

Wow, motte and bailey. Hengist et al publish a toy paper where they fed 14 guys pizza and ran a blood panel. Sure, why not. Probably took an afternoon, and was real cheap to do, gave some of his grad students publication credits and LaTeX experience. We learn that eating a pizza will not instantly give you diabetes, or make you obese, which we already knew. This, by itself, is fine. Separately, the University of Bath has a press office which is required to issue a certain number of press releases per year, even when the research isn't interesting. Again, no real problem. Plenty of press releases are issued with nobody ever reading them. If the University of Bath wants to employ people to do nothing useful, that's their own business. This press release is submitted to HN and gets a bunch of upvotes. Problem. People in the comments try to generalize the study. Big problem! The paper had no followup, no dose schedule, tiny experimental groups... because it wasn't trying to solve obesity! Nobody knows what's causing the obesity epidemic. There are many hypotheses, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results. There is no reliable way to lose weight.1 There are many diets that work for some people, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results. This is a nice little toy study. I don't doubt the data or the results. I just don't think it's useful. And studying obesity certainly isn't like running a randomized clinical trial on if beheading will kill a person! --- 1: Yes, if you lock someone in a cage and not give them food, they will lose weight. Obviously. Once you release them back into modern society, they will regain that weight.