Wine and Weight Loss
This story has been all over Twitter the last 24 hours for obvious reasons. It is one of those stories that seems too good to be true, so naturally people are excited:
Researchers found that regular moderate female drinkers were less likely to become obese after a 13 year study of more than 19,000 women.
The finding seems to contradict received dietary wisdom which has it that alcohol consumption leads to weight gain.
The body may use calories from alcohol in a different way from other foods which affects weight gain, doctors said.
It is thought that alcohol is broken down by the liver using a different metabolic pathway to create heat, rather than fat.
posted by allan at 9:21 AM
4 Comments:
I hate to get all research/stat dork on you (especially since I've yet to read the original research), but CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
Sorry, I just hate when this happens (major pet peeve) and it's more about the way people are talking about the study than you in particular.
Alcohol consumption may or may not be causally related to weight. It may however correlate with weight because both are related to other factors (e.g., maybe moderate drinkers are also moderate eaters and generally practice restraint in multiple areas of their lives).
I think it's an interesting finding that I plan to look more into given the relevance of this research to my day job, but I get really frustrated by people drawing unfounded conclusions that just create more confusion about research and research findings.
Diva,
I completely agree.
I remember a story my Sociology Statistics professor told the first day of class: In the 60s when there were a lot of riots going on someone commissioned a study to determine the causes of the riots (why an event would trigger a riot in one city, but not another). One thing the researchers found was that there was fairly reliable spike in ice cream sales just prior to the occurrence of a riot.
So, he asked us: do you think ice cream causes riots? And people spent the rest of class talking about sugar highs, etc.
Finally, at the end of class he pointed out what should have been obvious: people eat more ice cream when it is hot, it wasn't the ice cream causing the riots, there were several things, but hot weather seemed to be a reliable trigger.
Thanks for your comments and I would love to hear what you find out!
I'm in the process of tracking down the original study - I should get my hands on it in the next few days and will check back with you about it then.
Who cares if it is fluff science!! Let's just enjoy it!!!
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