If I read the word “link” one more time in some ostensibly serious health article I will – well, let’s just say that like Dorothy Parker’s Tonstant Weader I will thwow up.
Looks like a Bandersnatch to me …
Last week “scientists” apparently linked one’s gait as one aged to one’s likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s. Yet another observational study, casting about for some connection to something; naturally they eventually found some tenuous connection somewhere – at least one that they could write a press release about.
(As a researcher once described estrogen – “a drug in search of a disease”.)
No mention of whether this gait thing might have had something to do with other, perhaps undiagnosed, problems such as osteoarthritis or inner ear issues or what-have-you. No, one more thing for us to worry about as we get older – our damn gait.
Earlier headlines with that vile word “link” (plus variations like “linked”, “linking” and so on) always seem to be in the headline, which, of course, is what most people read. So we read that higher levels of Vitamin D3 are linked to all manner of marvelous things, from not getting cancer and heart disease to staying young and sharp and simply mah-velous. Never mind that when you simply test people who are well and compare them to people who are not, measure their “level” of D3 (as though all of us have the same ideal level) and then say, ‘oh, look, high D means better health so why don’t we all take a supplement” you have no way of knowing which came first, the good health or the D3. For all we know, various diseases deplete the body of D3 and the lack of the vitamin is not the cause of the problem but its consequence.
A number of more cautious researchers have been saying exactly this, to no avail. Various and sundry institutions from the Cancer Agency to the WHO have all decided to chime in with their recommendations that people take supplements.
This same kind of nonsense proliferated in the talk around estrogen for pretty much most of the 20th century. Researchers gushed that women who took estrogen “replacement” therapy (later “hormone replacement therapy” or HRT after it was found that estrogen alone could cause endometrial cancer) kept women young and healthy and prevented heart disease and dementia and probably hives and hangnails.
Replacement is in quotes earlier, incidentally, because it makes no sense to consider the hormone level of a woman of 23 normal for a woman at all other stages of life, particularly midlife, when all women’s hormones naturally decline.
Observational study upon observational study found a correlation (“link”) between women who took hormones and improved cardiac function, fewer heart attacks and strokes, better health, you-name-it. Well, except for the smidgeon of extra risk relating to breast cancer which epidemiologists dismissed as irrelevant. Of course this was not irrelevant to women, who didn’t rush to take hormones in droves, much to the researchers’ dismay.
Then the other show dropped. The largest clinical trial in history, the Women’s Health Initiative definitely showed that not only did estrogen not protect women from various and sundry age-related conditions, it actually could cause them. Cardiac disease was higher in women who took hormones and there was nothing “healthy” about HRT at all.
But hey, they had studies that “linked” estrogen use with health and who were we to argue?
A lot of people ask me about supplements, Calcium and D3, this and that, largely, I think, because of those headlines linking this and that arcane nutrient with health. Which is where my problem with all of this lies.
You can print whatever nonsense you want, provided you don’t make it sound as though you know what you’re talking about. Especially in the headline. People actually change their behavior based on these things. People start taking things, adding things, subtracting things. Forgetting that health is multifactorial, complex and begins in the womb.
You won’t have strong bones as an adult if you were malnourished as a child. Wealth tends to lead to health. People are different. And the nutrients we ingest in food are in a balance and ratio that the body can absorb. Versus our best-guess estimate of what an ideal amount of D3 or B3 or T3* might be.
So beware the dreaded link as though it were the bandersnatch. On average, I think the latter is more benign.
*Tylenol 3