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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 07 2019, @11:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the basic-science-fail dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Adding to the steaming pile of unsubstantiated hype over probiotics, the New York Times ran an uncritical article this week suggesting that a probiotic of heat-killed bacteria can treat obesity.

Of course, the data behind the story does not suggest that. In fact, the study is so small and the data so noisy and indirect, it's impossible to come to any conclusions about efficacy. There's also the nit-picky complaint that the study deals with dead bacteria, while probiotics are generally defined as being live bacteria. More importantly, the study was authored by researchers with a clear financial stake in the treatment succeeding. They hold a patent on the treatment and have started a company based on it—two details the New York Times seems to have forgotten to mention.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/the-new-york-times-suggests-a-probiotic-can-treat-obesity-the-data-doesnt/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Monday July 08 2019, @12:31AM (1 child)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday July 08 2019, @12:31AM (#864273)

    Or: New York Times thinks Obesity Probiotic company will fleece investors for billions and would like some of that sweet, sweet ad money.

    OK then. Not a very good headline, but a feasible hypothesis.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Monday July 08 2019, @01:02AM

    by driverless (4770) on Monday July 08 2019, @01:02AM (#864281)

    They didn't fall for it, note how the headline is phrased, Betteridge's Law in action. In fact the real crap is Arse Technica's reporting of it. The NYT "story" is at best a short footnote, it's very sceptical, "a small pilot study suggests", "The finding is significant, but it has to be confirmed in a larger cohort", etc. So "a brief summary in the NYT of a study in Nature Medicine indicates the results may be premature" would be a better conclusion, but then that wouldn't give Arse Technica a chance to show everyone how clever they are.