I was contacted last week by Alia Hoyt, who writes for the website HowStuffWorks.com, and who was writing an article about whether quinoa had gotten too popular for its own good.
Other than the usual question journalists ask me when it comes to quinoa–what did the quinoa price spike of 2013 do to the welfare of the people growing it?–Alia also had a few more questions that allowed me to share some thoughts I’ve been having about quinoa which I am not sure I have had a chance to share before.
A few months ago, The Lancet Public Health published a much-ballyhooed article by Seidelmann et al. linking dietary carbohydrate consumption that is either too low or too high with an increased risk of mortality.
I first heard about that article when I saw an article about it on CNN.com which, as is often the case with popular-press pieces about splashy public health findings, played fast and loose with the passage from correlation to causation.
When I read the CNN article, I didn’t think much of it, but my Allegheny College colleague Amelia Finaret got in touch with me asking me if I’d be interested in writing a short piece commenting on the Seidelmann et al. study for submission to The Lancet, the gist of which would be about the difficulty posed by making causal inference from observational data.
After a few days of iterating on our manuscript, we submitted it to The Lancet. I was happy to see that it was published yesterday, alongside several other comments on the Seidelmann et al. study. Best of all is the fact that our comment is open-access, meaning anyone with an Internet connection can read it. (Thank goodness for the fact that the publication costs for comments are cross-subsidized by the authors of original research articles!)
Here is a link to the .pdf of our comment; here is a link to the web version. The gist of our argument is that because of the presence of unobserved confounders, one cannot make a causal statement about the relationship between carbohydrate consumption and mortality. In other words, not all that glitters is gold.
Tom Reardon is one of my favorite agricultural economists. Not only is he incredibly productive (he has over published over 150 articles and his work has garnered over 27,000 Google Scholar citations), his work also has real-world policy impact (he was the first agricultural economist invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos). Over the years, Tom has been a wonderful mentor, and he has become a very good friend.
To know Tom is to love him, and if you know Tom well, you know that he has laser-like focus when it comes to his research, but that it can be hard to get him to focus on something that is not the writing of whatever he is currently working on right now. Over dinner, he is likely to go from discussing the etymology of an obscure French word to how e-commerce is disrupting food systems to how he has been struggling to make good brisket sous vide… all within five minutes!
So I was particularly happy to receive an email from Tom earlier this week in which he linked to a talk in which he focuses 75-minutes on the art of research discovery and writing good articles. If you are a researcher, whether early-career or seasoned, this is one of those rare occasions where a master craftsman takes the time to generously share some deep insights into his craft.