More studies

I spent a half hour tonight getting caught up on medical research. I try to read pubmed from time to time just so I know when my doctor is pitching crap to me or not.

This was an interesting recent study comparing diet composition with weight loss. I’m always surprised when I read research, because so much of it is bad, and the author’s never want to go out on a limb and say what their research really means. For example, in the study I just linked to, 57 people went on diets, half on one type, half on another. The average weight loss by group one was 5.7kg, while the average for group two was 6.9kg. That is, group two lost 21% more weight. But the researchers say that the weight lost “did not differ significantly” between the two groups? WTF?

This one caused me some grief since it’s the first study in quite a while that I didn’t really understand. I can’t tell if it’s good or bad. I’m gonna go with bad.

On another note, while trying to figure out how to link to a photo on flickr tonight, I started browsing through the HTML source. Some of my favourite tidbits I found in the HTML are:

• // create the location search crap!
• src=”/images/context_crap.gif”
• class=”crap”