Over the Christmas break my mother directed my attention
toward an issue of the “Food Network Magazine” (to which my Grandma subscribes)
and I got a chance to use all the heard earned science-y knowledge that I’ve
gained over the past couple years of psychological research.
If anyone subscribes to this magazine, you’ll remember the
“cheese issue” (an unforgettable issue for anyone like myself who finds
themselves in a love affair with cheese). Now I can get on board with a
magazine issue devoted to cheese. The culinary attributes of this delicious
food are too numerous to detail here. Indeed it takes an entire magazine to
document all the wonders of what cheese can do for your meals. In my personal
opinion, cheese makes just about everything better.
But what about the attributes of cheese that aren’t related
to flavor, texture, or richness?
Are there health attributes of cheese?
The following claims are made in the Food Network’s Cheese
Issue:
1 It
MAY stop cancer.
A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that vitamin K2
found in Gouda might help fend off cancer.
2 It
MAKES you smarter.
Those who consumed dairy products daily
scored higher on tests of mental ability, according to new University of Maine
research.
3It
SUPPORTS your heart.
Research published in Nutrition, Metabolism, & Cardiovascular Diseases shows pecorino romano may
lower levels of inflammation.
I It
MIGHT prevent diabetes.
In an American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition study, people who ate 55 grams of cheese a day (about two slices)
were less likely to get type 2 diabetes.
These are direct quotes from page 16 of the “all cheese”
issue of the Food Network’s Magazine.
Where to begin?
Perhaps a good place to start is a short lesson in causality
and the use of tentative language in science.
In grad school (or really, any time you intend on publishing
something), an important skill to develop is using tentative language – this is
the appropriate language one uses to describe different types of relationships
in science. It refers to avoiding claims that are too strong for what the data
actually imply.
The Food Network article does this for a few claims up
there. It MIGHT prevent diabetes. It MAY stop cancer!
As we know, a “causal” relationship and a “correlative”
relationship are quite different. The words denote separate concepts. Things
that are correlated to one another are sometimes also causally related to one
another, but just because two things are linked does not mean one assumed
component of the relationship causes the other.
Of course, I’m referring to the second claim in the
magazine.
“It MAKES you smarter!”
Does it? Well, maybe. Lets look at the evidence. Of course,
to validate this claim you need CAUSAL (experimental) evidence that cheese
actually causes better performance on a cognitive test of some sort. That means
you will need defined groups individuals randomly selected to receive cheese or
not and then test them using the same test of “mental ability” (cognition). And
preferably include a proposed mechanism as for why cheese would improve
cognitive ability.
Spoiler alert; the magazine predictably includes neither.
Instead, the evidence for the claim that cheese makes you
smarter is supported by some University of Maine research (what kind, the world
may never know, since the journal isn’t cited…come to think of it, we can’t
even be sure that peer review was involved at all, as the citation of a journal
would indicate that the work had been published, and the lack of one seems
telling…)
Furthermore, the research finds simply that people who
consumed dairy products score higher on tests of mental ability. Compared to
who? Questions abound.
This statements smacks of correlation at best, and terrible
research interpretation at worst (but who knows, there aren’t enough details here).
But I’m not really writing this to talk about correlation vs. causation. Because this isn’t an undergraduate research methods class. And
for most of you, I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir.
I’m writing this, because frankly – I’m annoyed.
The claims made by Food Network in this particular article generally use tentative language. At the very least, they cite research that has been
peer reviewed. All except that which implies benefits of cheese from a
cognitive perspective. Apparently, claims about cognitive benefits don’t
require peer reviewed research, or appropriate scientific language.
And the deeper problem with this is that being lazy about
the language surrounding cognitive science undermines its credibility. After
all, if there was a definable way to determine what actually impacts cognitive
ability positively, the author of this article would be under more pressure to
use tentative language (the way it is for cancer and diabetes). But there
isn’t.
Except that there IS. We DO know what improves cognitive
ability. There’s a whole field of science that looks at what sort of
interventions impact cognitive ability. None of them to my knowledge involve
cheese.
I haven’t read this research from the University of Maine.
Who knows, maybe someone who loves cheese as much as I do devised a study where
they randomly assigned people to eat cheese and then perform some sort of
problem solving or comprehension task. But somehow, I sort of doubt it.
Cheese is great.
If you want to be smarter, read a book.
