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December 16, 2006

Confused Americans for Truth - Study Shows Journalists Still Don't Understand Studies

by Ferdinand T Cat

The Evening Standard's This is London web site features an article with the headline Vegetarians are more intelligent, says study.

This is, of course, the way things work in dinosaur movies and cartoons, but it is certainly not the way things work in the real world, so I thought I would investigate. The original study, by the way, can be read here.

The study involved interviewing people at age 30 who had IQ tests at age 10, to find out whether they considered themselves vegetarians and what type of diet they were following. Of the 8170 subjects of the study, 366 considered themselves vegetarian. The mean IQ of those 366 was 106.1, and the mean IQ for the others was 100.5. It's worth noting that this is a very small difference. It's even more notable that 123 of those people considered themselves vegetarians even though they regularly consumed fish and chicken. By that definition, I'm a vegetarian, too.

The wierdest part of the study is the following quote from the lead investigator, Dr. Catharine Gale.

Although our results suggest that children who are more intelligent may be more likely to become vegetarian as adolescents or young adults, it does not rule out the possibility that such a diet might have some beneficial effect on subsequent cognitive performance.

The study, in fact, says absolutely nothing either way on this topic, so the statement tells us more about the biases of the investigator than it does about any sort of scientific truth. That same bias is present in the author of the Evening Standard article, which is why he chose a headline of Vegetarians are more intelligent instead of the more truthful Smarter people tend to become vegetarians. That, however, is nothing compared to the following passage from the Evening Standard article.

The researchers, from the University of Southampton, tracked the fortunes of more than 8,000 volunteers for 20 years.

At the age of ten, the boys and girls sat a series of tests designed to determine their IQ.

When they reached the age of 30, they were asked whether they were vegetarian and their answers compared to their childhood IQ score.

This is at best a very misleading statement. In fact, the IQ tests were taken as part of a different project. At the culmination of that project six years ago, the participants were interviewed about their life style and habits. Gale's study involved reading through the interviews and selecting the people who had discussed their dietary habits. As a result, only half of the people in the original study were included in Gale's analysis. Far from tracking the fortunes of their subjects for 20 years, the researchers involved in Gale's study never left the office.

This is the age of the Internet, and you can do a lot without leaving the office. In particular, you can look up the actual facts behind a news article and discover that they're very different from what is reported. I keep wondering why journalists don't do the same level of research I do, since it's not that difficult or expensive.

The University of Southampton should do a study about that.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Perri Nelson's Website, The Random Yak, Adam's Blog, Stuck On Stupid, The Bullwinkle Blog, The Amboy Times, Wake Up America, Rightwing Guy, 123 Beta, The Cutting Edge, The HILL Chronicles, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The Uncooperative Blogger ®, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, Blue Star Chronicles, Dumb Ox News, and Culturetastic, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Comments

"I keep wondering why journalists don't do the same level of research I do, since it's not that difficult or expensive."
My guess is either A) sheer laziness or B) the truth interferes with their opinion.


Posted by: DragonLady at December 18, 2006 7:03 AM

Well Ferdy, I think that they do - do the research, but just do not tell the truth and skew things, anything for ratings and readership. To me it is more about a lack of integrity amongst journalists than anything else. It really is ashame.


Posted by: Layla at December 18, 2006 4:22 PM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

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