Heather Bedard, C.H.E.
Learning how to research has been one of the most enlightening and encouraging things that I have learned in my studies. Understanding how studies are written, and the things to look for, has given me so much more confidence and insight, and I hope that it will bring some clarity to you as well when you are searching for truth in health. In this article, we are just covering the basics. To do a deep dive on this subject would take many more articles, but one of our educational courses will be covering this topic in depth in the future.
Where to find studies
One of the things that makes research difficult is that the medical journals are full of poorly designed studies, studies that don’t matter, and industry funded studies. Many of these studies are proclaimed in consumer publications as proof that the carnivore diet is the way to go, or that butter is back! Just because it is a well-known medical journal doesn’t mean that every study is well referenced or supported by evidence. This is the most important time to keep an open mind and not approach your research with bias. You could pretty much find any study to prove anything you want to believe. However, there is hope! There are some guidelines we can use to determine the quality of the study we are looking at.
But first things, first. How do we find these studies? There are many different websites you could go to, to search for research articles. One of the things you could do is do an online search that goes something like, is MSG good for you research studies. The search engine will pull up many possible results. Depending on which search engine you use, the results will be different, so you may have to do some deeper digging. In 2018 Google changed their algorithm to affect search results having to do with natural or health related websites. Many of the websites lost 99% of their traffic in a moment. You’ll notice now that many of the results that come up are government approved or funded websites.
When you do research on a topic you will want to cover all different angles. So, accordingly, search MSG is bad for you research studies or health benefits of MSG along with side effects of MSG. When you click on a link, you will see the author’s name, the date it was written and where the author works. Typically, underneath this you will see what is called the abstract. This is a summary of what is in the article. Many times you can tell from this if the article is worth reading or not. If you want to read the full article, you can click on the DOI which stands for Digital Object Identifier. Most of these websites offer the studies for free, but there are also some who don’t. You can generally find a good amount of information without having to have a paid subscription and most abstracts are free.
Conflicts of Interest
Now, here is where it gets interesting. Scroll down to the bottom of the article to see whether or not there are conflicts of interest. Usually this means that the author works for the company in question or is financially supported from them to some extent. Authors are supposed to declare this, but it doesn’t always happen. However, you can always google the author and find out more information if you are unsure or feel that the format of the study seems biased. Often when it comes to industry funding for studies (i.e. dairy industry for pro-dairy studies) the funding comes with a caveat that the findings are pro-dairy. Sponsorships do not always come with this string attached, but it does leave room for questions and conflicts of interest. On top of that, It's not just the researchers that can have a conflict of interest. The journals themselves are also obligated to their advertisers and this can determine what studies get published and which ones do not.
Study Design
Single studies - Singular studies are often a poor reflection of the true outcome when one looks at the preponderance of evidence. It’s easy to pull out info from a singular study but it’s important to make sure that what you’re finding is supported by many different sources.
Meaningless Results – A study that shows a 1% increase in benefit or that someone lost ½ lb of body fat isn’t statistically significant. This doesn’t make taking a drug with 30 side effects worthwhile, or a complicated eating plan beneficial in my opinion. If a drug is that impotent, why should we care? When I say, statistically significant, what I am trying to determine is whether or not these observations are worth acting on. For example, if I have a study that shows eating nuts reduces the risk of heart attack by 1%, that may be statistically significant (worth reporting) but is a 1% reduction of risk worth acting on for someone who is at risk for heart attacks? Maybe not so much. That would be for you to determine.
Studies that compare similar percentages - For example, a study like the Mediterranean diet study that shows oil is health promoting or doesn’t make a difference in health outcomes will often compare two high fat groups (i.e. 39% to 37% fat diets) and come to the conclusion that fat doesn’t matter or there were no changes in health outcomes. A better study would be one that compares a high fat diet with a truly low-fat diet to see the real difference. The idea is that fat must be lowered considerably to see the health benefits.
Pam Popper from Wellness Forum Health has a great analogy on this. She explains that a good analogy would be, looking at the effects of speed on death rates in automobile accidents. If studies show that accidents that take place when cars are traveling 90 miles per hour almost always result in death and the same is true for accidents involving speeds of 80 miles per hour, one could report that driving slower does not matter. It really does matter, but only when speed is reduced significantly more, say to 30 miles per hour.
All of this is not to say that there are not researchers with integrity who structure studies in an unbiased way – because there are. But, it is easy to create the outcome that you want by structuring the study to do so – so informed consumers must be aware of this.
Correlation vs cause-and-effect
That leads me to the difference between correlation and cause-and-effect relationships. For example, just because there is a relationship that shows that women who live in areas of lots of traffic have a higher risk of breast cancer (yes there are studies like this out there), that doesn’t mean that traffic causes breast cancer. This is an interesting observation, but may be just that…interesting. Often these observations can lead us to dig deeper on different topics and give some direction but shouldn’t be what we base our healthcare decisions on.
Continue on to "Do Your Research! Part 2" for more information.