{"id":13205,"date":"2018-11-07T05:00:57","date_gmt":"2018-11-07T11:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=13205"},"modified":"2018-11-06T11:57:19","modified_gmt":"2018-11-06T17:57:19","slug":"dietary-carbohydrate-intake-and-mortality-not-all-that-glitters-is-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/13205","title":{"rendered":"Dietary Carbohydrate Intake and Mortality: Not All that Glitters is Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, The Lancet Public Health<\/em> published a much-ballyhooed article<\/a>\u00a0by Seidelmann et al. linking dietary carbohydrate consumption that is either too low or too high with an increased risk of mortality.<\/p>\n

I first heard about that article when I saw an article<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

When I read the CNN article, I didn’t think much of it, but my Allegheny College colleague Amelia Finaret<\/a> 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<\/em>, the gist of which would be about the difficulty posed by making causal inference from observational data.<\/p>\n

After a few days of iterating on our manuscript, we submitted it to The Lancet<\/em>. 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!)<\/p>\n