Episodes
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Okay, it’s time to finally answer the question: is drinking booze good or bad? Is there really a “J-curve”, such that it’s bad to drink zero alcohol, good to drink a little, and then bad to drink any more than that? What exactly is the “safe level” of alcohol consumption, and why do the meta-analyses on this topic all seem to tell us entirely different things?
In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart get very badly intoxicated—with statistics.
We’re sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. There’s no better place online to find essays on the topic of “Progress Studies”—the new field that digs deep into the data on how scientific and technological advances were made in the past, and tries to learn the lessons for the future. Check them out at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Media reports say alcohol is good! Oh no wait, it’s bad. Oh, sorry, it’s actually good! No, wait, actually bad. And so on, ad infinitum
* The three conflicting meta-analyses:
* 2018 in The Lancet (“no safe level”)
* 2022 in The Lancet (the J-curve returns)
* 2023 in JAMA Network Open (using “occasional drinkers” as the comparison)
* Some of the press coverage about the J-curve age differences
* David Spiegelhalter’s piece comparing the two Lancet meta-analyses
* Tom’s piece on the idea of “safe drinking”
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. We’re very grateful to Sir David Spiegelhalter for talking to us about this episode (as ever, any errors are ours alone).
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
Everyone knows your brain hasn’t finished maturing until you’re 25. That’s so well-known, in fact, that some countries (like Scotland) have built it into their criminal justice system, giving lower sentences to under-25s—even very violent ones—on account of their immature brains.
But in this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss what the evidence really says about when the brain matures—and the trickiness of linking important policy decisions to the science.
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, who don’t just have their magazine (at worksinprogress.co), but also have a Substack with a range of extra articles. It’s all thoughtful, thought-provoking stuff—and its all free. Find it at worksinprogress.news.
Show notes
* The three Scottish criminal cases:
* “Golf club thug spared jail over age”
* Community service not jail for rape (and the conviction later quashed)
* 3 year-jail sentence for rape
* The Scottish Sentencing Council guidelines from 2022
* The commissioned review by University of Edinburgh on brain maturation
* Useful 2022 Nature paper on structural “brain charts for the human lifespan”
* 2024 preprint on the lifespan trajectory of functional brain activation for cognitive control
* 2023 paper with 10,000 people aged 8-35 measured on executive function tests
* BBC Science Focus article by Dean Burnett on the “brain matures at age 25” idea
* “The myth of the 25-year-old brain” in Slate
* Stuart’s i article from last year on the Scottish Sentencing Council
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
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Did your schoolteacher also do the thing with the banana and the condom? It might’ve been cringe and awkward, but just ask the experts: the evidence is “clear and compelling” that sex education classes reduce the likelihood of teenage pregnancy, the transmission of STIs, and even the prevalence of sexual abuse.
In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart ask the inevitable question: how “clear and compelling” are we talking, here? Those experts wouldn’t exaggerate the strength of the evidence for something like this… would they?
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It’s one of the best-known findings of psychology research: kids who can delay gratification by not eating a marshmallow will grow up healther, wiser, and more successful. But guess what? Later studies had trouble finding the same results. What do we actually know about delaying gratification?
Get ready to control yourselves, because in this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart tell the story of yet another famous psychological study that turned out not to live up to the hype.
The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. If you’re looking for thoughtful essays on areas of policy, science, and technology that you might not have considered previously, there’s no better place. Check it out at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* The famous 1988 paper by Walter Mischel and colleagues on predicting teenage outcomes from childhood marshmallow test performance, and the famous 1990 one (including the SAT predictions)
* And the much older research that this follows up
* Walter Mischel’s 2014 book The Marshmallow Test
* Publicity piece on the book in Vox
* First proper replication study from 2018
* Debate about how the study used covariates
* Really good Vox article describing the replication
* 2021 paper (co-authored by Mischel) following up on the original participants
* New 2024 paper following up on the replication study
* Heavily-cited 2011 paper from the Dunedin study on the predictive power of self-control measures
* Inzlicht and Roberts (2024) on trait vs. state self-control, and why we might have been thinking about this the wrong way
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
We’ve now been making this podcast for a year(!). We thought we’d mark the occasion with a grossly self-indulgent look back through our favourite episodes - and our least favourites, too.
We’ve still got a massive list of potential episode topics, but we always want more. Which topics would you like us to look into? Comments below are open to all.
Thanks for listening. And remember: if you like The Studies Show, please tell a friend about it!
Show notes
* Study showing consistent results from multiple cognitive test batteries
* Lucy Foulkes’s paper on the “prevalence inflation hypothesis”
* Semaglutide and quitting smoking
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
Remember when they were coming to take your gas stove away? Every so often a study about the effects of air pollution on health goes viral, and we’re reminded again that seemingly innocuous objects—like your kitchen cooker—could be bad for us in unexpected ways. How bad is air pollution? And is it getting any better?
In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look into the science of air pollution, trying to separate correlation from causality, and working out what scientists mean when they say that deaths are “attributable” to something (it’s more complicated than you think!).
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. We usually mention their long-form pieces at worksinprogress.co, but they also have a Substack newsletter at worksinprogress.news with shorter articles on the same topics. We commend it to you, and thank Works in Progress for sponsoring the podcast.
Show notes
* Recent news about “Ella’s Law” in the UK
* Tom’s 2019 Unherd article on air pollution
* “Death risk from London's toxic air sees ‘utterly horrifying’ rise for second year running”
* The Our World In Data “Deaths by Risk Factor” graph
* 2024 BMJ Open article about the health risks of coal power stations
* Dynomight’s long article on air quality
* The 1952 “Great Smog of London”
* More useful Our World In Data articles:
* An explainer on “attributable fractions” and summing up multiple risk factors
* On indoor air pollution
* Deaths from outdoor pollution
* Death rate from outdoor pollution
* Deaths from outdoor pollution vs. GDP per capita
* The WHO calls indoor air pollution “the world’s single largest environmental health risk”
* More on attributable fractions, with some examples
* Example of an experimental study on the effects of air pollution
* The article that sparked the Great Cooker Controversy of 2023
* Example of the media coverage at the time
* Biden forced to rule out a ban on gas cookers
* Recent story on how there’s “no safe level” of PM2.5
* Based on this 2024 paper in the BMJ
* How policy interventions can reduce (and have reduced) air pollution
* London report on the effect of ULEZ
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com
We all agree that misinformation is bad. So why do we cringe when we hear prominent scientists and commentators talking about “misinformation” these days?
It’s because the public discussion on misinformation bears very little relation to what we actually know about it and its effects. Ironically, some scientists—misinformation researchers who should know better—are at the root of this confusion.
In this epic-length, paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart take “misinformation” researchers to task for spreading, er, misinformation. Warning: contains strong and intemperate—but very justified—language.
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Last week’s episode covered a man-made existential risk to humanity—nuclear war. But what about natural risks? Could there, right now, be a vast asteroid sailing through space that’ll collide with Earth, sending us go the way of the dinosaurs?
In this rocky episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look at the data on how often we should expect civilisation-destroying asteroids to hit Earth - and what if anything we can do about it if one is approaching.
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, the best place on the internet to find mind-changing essays on science, technology, and human progress. We’ve both written for WiP—one of Tom’s articles there is the basis for this episode. You can find all their issues for free at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Tom’s Works in Progress article on the threat from asteroids, on which this episode is based
* Toby Ord’s book The Precipice, on existential risk (including discussion of asteroids)
* Article from Finn Moorhouse on risks from asteroids
* Analysis of moon craters to work out how often asteroids hit
* And an equation to calculate the impact power of an asteroid hit, from the characteristics of the asteroid
* Report from the 2013 US Congressional hearing on threats from outer space
* NASA’s explanation of how it scans space for asteroids
* Carl Sagan’s 1994 article on the “dual-use” propensity of asteroid-deflection technology
* 2015 article on mining asteroids, and how nudging them closer could help
* Just one example of a recent article (2024) on asteroid deflection techniques
* 2023 Nature article about the successful DART mission to nudge an asteroid with kinetic force
* NASA’s DART page with extra news and info
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
The UK has a new Prime Minister, and one of his first acts will have been to write letters to the captains of our nuclear missile submarines, telling them what to do in the event that the UK gets obliterated by a nuclear strike.
But what else might happen after a full-scale nuclear war? Many scientists—most notably Carl Sagan—have theorised that nuclear war would block out the sun, destroy crops, and maybe lead to human extinction. But it turns out this is a very controversial theory. In this rather grim episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart try and work out who’s right, and if nuclear winter really would be the end of the world.
Another thing the new Prime Minister should be doing is reading Works in Progress magazine, the sponsor of The Studies Show. If he does, he’ll find a wealth of ideas that he and his government could use to spark progress and growth in the UK - and in particular, he should be reading the classic essay “The Housing Theory of Everything”. You can find that and much more at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Putin warning the West that Russia is “ready” for nuclear war
* Ned Donovan’s article on the UK Prime Minister’s “Letters of Last Resort”
* The 2024 test where the UK’s nuclear deterrent went “plop”
* Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario
* A podcast episode and a Reddit thread criticising the book
* Wikipedia on the Moscow-Washington and Beijing-Washington phone lines
* The terrifying stories of Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov
* Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, about nuclear near-misses
* The 11-ton “Mother Of All Bombs” (MOAB) vs. the 9-megaton B53 thermonuclear warhead
* Neil Halloran’s YouTube video on deaths during and after a nuclear explosion
* His later video discussing how he overstated nuclear winter effects
* The “Nuke Map”, where you can see how much of a given city would be in the blast radius of a variety of different warheads
* The two original 1983 nuclear winter papers in Science: the slightly more circumspect one; the one that mentions human extinction
* Long Effective Altruism forum post by Michael Hinge on the evidence for and against nuclear winter effects
* Even more detailed post on the same subject by Vasco Grilo
* Three papers from three different teams on a regional nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan:
* The Rutgers team’s original paper in 2014
* The follow-up by the Los Alamos team in 2018 (response from Rutgers; response from Los Alamos)
* The follow-up by the Lawrence Livermore team in 2020
* Carl Sagan’s prediction of severe climate effects from Iraq’s burning of the Kuwaiti oil wells in 1990/1991
* Discussion of why that didn’t happen
* The extremely sceptical Naval Gazing blog post on nuclear winter
* Paper from nuclear winter theorists accusing the US of genocide in Japan
* Toby Ord’s book The Precipice, on existential risk
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
This week it’s the UK General Election, and lots of other countries either have elections coming soon or have recently voted. Lots of pollsters and political scientists have been attempting to predict the outcomes - but how successful will they be?
In this Studies Show election special, Tom and Stuart discuss the various quirks and downsides of opinion polls, and ask how scientific political science really is.
The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine - the best place online to find beautifully-written essays about human progress. How can we learn from the past so that we can solve problems quicker in future? How can we apply this kind of mindset to subjects as diverse as science, medicine, technology, architecture, and infrastructure? Get some great ideas at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Ben Ansell’s book Why Politics Fails
* The polls that got Brexit wrong (but where online polling did better)
* The “Lizardman Constant”
* Stuart’s 2023 i article on whether it’s really true that 25% of British people think COVID was a “hoax”
* Recent-ish paper by Andrew Gelman on Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP)
* Examples of recent MRPs from the UK (and one from the US from 2020)
* The surprising utility of just using “uniform swing”
* The very embarrassing 2010 “psychoticism” mixup between conservatism and liberalism - which even has its own Wikipedia page
* Article on the replication crisis in political science
* 2017 article with examples of where political bias might’ve affected political science
* The Michael LaCour case, where a political scientist fabricated an entire canvassing study and got it published in Science
* Weirdly, even though the study was fake, the principle behind it does seem to be correct
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. We’re grateful to Prof. Ben Ansell for talking to us about polling. Any errors are our own.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com
There’s one thing we know Viagra does very well. But what other uses does it have? Can it, as has now been claimed in three separate studies, prevent Alzheimer’s disease?
In this priapic paid-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart ask if there might be something to the theory that, through some vascular mechanism, Viagra might slow the effects of dementia. Or is that all just a phallus… er, fallacy?
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The criminal justice system and science are both broadly looking for the same thing - the truth. But in many cases the two don’t mix well. Whether it’s court cases that attempt to decide the truth of a scientific dispute, or the use of fingerprints, DNA, or statistics by the prosecution in a murder case, a lot can go wrong - and there’s a lot at stake.
Inspired by the recent discussion, or perhaps lack of discussion, around [a criminal case nobody in the UK can talk about for legal reasons], Tom and Stuart spend this episode looking into what happens when science meets the law.
Our favourite online magazine is Works in Progress - so it’s particularly pleasing that they’re the sponsors of The Studies Show. Works in Progress publish in-depth essays on underrated ideas to improve the world, covering the history and future of science and technology. Go to worksinprogress.co to read their entire archive for free.
Show notes
* UK man arrested for airport-related joke (2010); UK man arrested and punished (narrowly avoiding prison) for saying “burn auld fella, buuuuurn” upon the death of “Captain Tom” (2022)
* Simon Singh successfully sued by chiropractors (but then successfully appeals; 2010)
* Paper on the Italian criminal cases that helped fuel the anti-vaccine movement
* Jim Carrey campaigns against vaccines
* Tom’s 2018 New Scientist article on glyphosate and cancer
* 1995 article on the “phantom risks” of breast implants
* Helen Joyce on the Sally Clark case
* Tom’s 2024 Unherd article on “the dangers of trial by statistics”
* 2022 Royal Statistical Society report on the same topic
* How Bayes-savvy statisticians helped overturn Lucia de Berk’s conviction
* Gerd Gigerenzer on OJ Simpson
* 2022 philosophy paper on the issues with forensic science
* 2016 White House report on the gaps in forensic science
* Dror & Hampikian (2011) study on bias in DNA interpretation
* 2009 “Texas sharpshooter” paper on the rarity (or not) of DNA matches
* Useful 2023 review of human factors research in forensic science
* Interviews with 150 forensic examiners on potential biases in their work
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
To be addicted to something, you’ve got to… er, actually, what does it mean to be “addicted” to something? We all agree you can be addicted to heroin, but can you also be addicted to videogames, or sex, or listening to podcasts?
And actually, it turns out we don’t all agree you can be addicted to heroin - or, at least, people have very different models of what that means. In what is effectively an hour-long clarification of a throwaway comment in a previous episode, Tom and Stuart talk through the various aspects of addiction, and try to pin down the scientific definition of what turns out to be a strangely elusive concept.
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, whose recent issue covers its usual mix of science, technology, and policy ideas to help with human flourishing. Read deeply-researched articles about prediction markets, gentrification, concrete, and drink-driving policy at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Addiction: A Very Short Introduction, by Keith Humphries
* And his Atlantic article on how de-stigmatising drugs could be a mistake
* Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and How to Spend it Better) by Pete Etchells
* Scotland’s unbelievably bad drug problem in one graph
* Theodore Dalrymple on Samuel Taylor Coleridge
* And another historical case: The Rugeley Poisoner
* US physician referring to addiction as a “disease” in 1874
* And a German physician discusses “morbid craving” for morphine in 1875
* Made-up Victorian theories on the cause of addiction
* Useful Vaughan Bell article on “the unsexy truth” about dopamine
* Evidence that Parkinson’s patients still experience pleasure despite low dopamine levels
* Evidence that a majority of (UK) smokers want to quit
* The CAGE screening questionnaire for alcohol disorders
* On the 1980 letter cited in and discussed in Dopesick
* Marc Lewis’s Memoirs of an Addicted Brain
* A discussion and critique of the “Rat Park” experiments
* Paper on “Addictive Symptoms of Mukbang Watching” (this is real!)
* The jokey origins of “Internet Use Disorder”
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
Should you avoid giving your child peanuts to ensure they don’t develop an allergy? If you’d asked medical authorities this question in the late 90s and early 2000s, you’d get an answer that’s completely opposite to what you’d get now.
In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss the science behind the medical recommendations on peanut allergy - the remarkable story of a major scientific U-turn.
The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. Their latest article, about “advance market commitments” for vaccines and antibiotics and other stuff besides, is now available at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Useful review article on the “diagnosis and management of food allergy”
* Analysis of UK NHS data on hospitalisations and mortality from anaphylaxis
* Two studies raising doubts about parents’ claims that their child has an allergy
* Recommendations on improving tests for food allergy
* 1998 UK Department of Health document recommending not to give children peanuts until 3 years of age
* 2000 American Academy of Pediatrics statement that broadly agrees
* Stuart’s 2023 i article on the controversy
* 2008 observational study comparing Jewish children in the UK (no peanuts) to Jewish children in Israel (lots of peanuts)
* …after which the advice in the UK is announced to be “suspended”
* The 2015 LEAP randomised controlled trial on peanut avoidance vs. peanut consumption in infants
* Follow-up of the same data to age 12
* BBC article about the follow-up
* Observational study from Australia finding no significant change in the prevalence of peanut allergy
* Paper arguing that if we want to see effects, we need to give peanuts to babies even earlier
* The EAT trial of food allergen exposure in non-high-risk infants
* Re-analysis of LEAP and EAT data to work out the best age to administer peanuts
* The PreventADALL study from Sweden
* 2019 article collecting examples of “medical reversals” from across the scientific literature
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
Many Western countries, most notably the US, had a major decline in their crime rate in the 1990s. About 20 years earlier, the US had banned the use of lead in gasoline. Perhaps you wouldn’t think those two facts are related - but many researchers think this wasn’t a coincidence.
After getting distracted and doing a whole episode on lead and IQ a couple of weeks ago, Tom and Stuart get to the subject they intended to cover: the lead-crime hypothesis. How strong is the evidence that the presence of lead in a child’s early environment increases their propensity for crime when they grow up? And how strong is the evidence that lead removal (at least partly) caused the declining crime rate?
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress, the magazine full of new and underrated ideas for advancing science, technology, and humanity. They have a new issue out right now, which opens with a fascinating essay on the decline of drink-driving. Check it out at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Numbers on the US crime rate over time
* Evidence from Finland on IQ and crime
* The first study (to our knowledge) on the lead-crime hypothesis, from 2007
* Rob Verbruggen’s 2021 Manhattan Institute report on lead and crime
* Jennifer Doleac’s 2021 Niskanen Center report on lead and crime
* Paper focusing on 1920s/30s America and the impact of lead on crime
* 2020 Swedish paper on moss lead levels and crime
* 2021 PNAS paper on lead and personality change
* 2022 meta-analysis on the lead-crime hypothesis
* 2023 systematic review on the same topic
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com
Johann Hari is a journalist with an interesting past who has now written four very popular books on scientific topics (addiction, depression, attention, and obesity). Are those books any good?
In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart—who have both written reviews of Hari’s books—discuss Hari’s career, his sudden emergence as a science writer, and exactly how many miles you need to travel around the world to ensure your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.
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Petrol, pipes, paint: they made a whole generation duller. That’s if you believe the research on the effects of lead on IQ. By interfering with neurological development, the lead that we used to encounter routinely has left hundreds of millions of us with a tiny bit of brain damage.
In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look at the toxic effects of lead - from very obvious, high-dose lead poisoning to the more insidious, low-level effects that have apparently held millions of people back. How strong is the evidence for the effects of low-level lead exposure on IQ?
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, a journal of ideas to accelerate human progress. If you’re a student aged 18-22 and want to attend the Works in Progress “Invisible College” this August (at which Stuart is speaking), take a look at this link.
Show Notes
* Centers for Disease Control (CDC) page on lead poisoning
* Articles on the history of lead poisoning from the BBC and the Guardian
* 2022 PNAS study concluding that “half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood” (the one with the “824,097,690” figure)
* Article on blood lead levels and which are considered dangerous
* The 2005 meta-analysis on lead and children’s IQs
* Cited in the 2021 “Global Lead Exposure Report”
* The critique from the CDC in 2007
* The critique paper from 2013
* The critique paper from 2016
* The correction from 2019
* The critique paper from 2020
* Quasi experiments: from Rhode Island; using manufacturing employment
* 2018 paper on low-level lead and all-cause mortality
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
Preventing cancer. Curing depression. Single-handedly ending the COVID-19 pandemic. Oh, and something to do with your bones. Is there anything Vitamin D can’t do?
Maybe the answer is: “quite a lot”. In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look into the claims about the wondrous powers of Vitamin D supplements - and whether any of them have any decent evidence behind them. The whole story turns out to be a perfect parable for how to think about health research.
📚Buy Tom’s book, Everything is Predictable, at this link! And join us at the book launch in London on 16th May 2024! 📚
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine: the stylish, well-argued, data-packed place to read essays about science, technology and human progress. Find their latest issue at this link.
Show notes
* Rupa Huq MP’s article from during the COVID pandemic on how the government should be “shouting about Vitamin D”
* Huq and David Davis MP convince the government to recommend Vitamin D
* Stuart’s New Statesman article on why this was jumping the gun a little
* How Vitamin D regulates calcium and phosphorus metabolism in the body
* Might it slow tumour growth? Or prevent cardiovascular disease? Evidence from rats
* Observational studies on how Vitamin D levels are related to: depression, cognitive impairment, cancer rates, cardiovascular disease, all-cause mortality
* Review paper claiming widespread deficiency in Vitamin D
* Scientific American article including discussion of the confusion over what it means to be “deficient” in, and/or have an “insufficiency” of Vitamin D
* 2019 paper reporting results from the VITAL trial on cancer and cardiovascular risk
* D-health trial results on cancer risk and cardiovascular risk
* From the D-health trial, papers reporting no effect of Vitamin D supplementation on: cognitive impairment, depression, microbiome diversity, telomere length, hypothyroidism, erectile dysfunction, falls, fractures
* Classic xkcd cartoon on false-positive jelly beans
* 2022 Nature Reviews Endrocrinology review on the (lack of) evidence for the effects of Vitamin D beyond bone-related problems
* Story of UK man who died of a Vitamin D overdose
* Vitamin D and COVID: the promising observational study; the null trial
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
We can all agree that being lonely is bad. But apparently, science shows it’s really, really bad. Indeed, being lonely is so dangerous to your health that its equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And it gets worse: we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, meaning that the health of millions is at risk.
In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart ask two questions: is there actually a loneliness epidemic? And does it make sense to compare loneliness to something as bad for you as smoking cigarettes?
The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. Click here to see the latest issue, packed with essays on YIMBYism, clinical research, Russian history, railway tunnels, and more.
Show notes
* The US Surgeon General’s report into “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation”
* Articles on the loneliness epidemic from the BBC, NPR, the BBC again, the New York Times, the New York Times again, and Science magazine
* 2023 article in The Times (London) that makes the 15-cigarettes-a-day comparison
* The 2017 Jo Cox report on “Combatting Loneliness”
* 2010 meta-analysis of social relationships and mortality risk
* American Time Use Survey, 2003-2020
* Meta-Gallup poll from 2022 on “The Global State of Social Connections”
* Are US older adults getting lonelier (2019 study)? What about “emerging adults” (2021 meta-analysis)?
* Comparison between younger-old people and older-old people on their loneliness levels
* 2017 review study on the health effects of loneliness
* 2023: systematic review no.1, systematic review no.2, both into the effects of loneliness on health
* 2005 study on the health effects of smoking tobacco
Credits
* The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com
The evidence for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for young people with gender dysphoria is “remarkably weak”. That’s according to the Cass Review, a new in-depth report commissioned by NHS England.
As you might imagine, the report’s conclusions have been somewhat controversial. In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart read through the Cass Report, consider the arguments of its critics, and try to put the whole thing in context.
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