School Lunches, P-Hacking and the Original "Pizzagate"
Maintenance Phase
Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
4.8 • 16.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2021
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we're diving into one of the biggest-ever scandals in nutrition research. For nearly two decades, Brian Wansink's Food and Brand Lab told Americans that lower weights, healthier workplaces and better school lunches were just a few small tweaks away. Then, in 2015, he wrote a blog post and it all came crashing down.
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Links!
- A Credibility Crisis in Food Science
- Statistical heartburn: An attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab
- Brian Wansink: Data Masseur, Media Villain, Emblem of a Thornier Problem
- The Wansink Dossier: An Overview
- More Evidence That Nutrition Studies Don’t Always Add Up
- Here’s How Cornell Scientist Brian Wansink Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies About How We Eat
- False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant
- Death of a Veggie Salesman
- The Strange, Uplifting Tale of “Joy of Cooking” Versus the Food Scientist
- Moms, “Food Fears” and the Power of the Internet
- The science behind Smarter Lunchrooms
- You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition
- Energy balance measurement: when something is not better than nothing
- Scientific method: Statistical errors
- Effect of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act on the Nutritional Quality of Meals Selected by Students and School Lunch Participation Rates
- 9.67 Degrees of Deception
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that will gladly trade you two |
| 0:15.8 | regular milk tickets for one chocolate milk ticket. |
| 0:18.8 | That's good. |
| 0:20.4 | I knew we were talking about school lunches and that was my one very vivid memory. |
| 0:26.4 | The podcast that serves you turkey tetrazini. |
| 0:28.9 | I'm Aubrey Gordon. |
| 0:30.9 | I am Michael Hobbs. |
| 0:31.9 | If you'd like to support the show, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. |
| 0:35.9 | We're now releasing bonus episodes so you can enjoy some bonus content. |
| 0:40.4 | Support the show if you want to and don't if you do. |
| 0:42.7 | Keep listening and never give us a dime. |
| 0:44.2 | It's chill. |
| 0:45.2 | That's right. |
| 0:46.2 | And today, we are talking about school lunches, I think. |
| 0:49.6 | Aubrey, I'm so excited. |
| 0:51.2 | Oh, I can't wait. |
| 0:52.2 | This is our first, I think, straight forward clickbait episode. |
| 0:57.7 | I am going to title this episode school lunches, pee hacking and the original pizza gate. |
| 1:04.5 | The original pizza gate. |
| 1:06.4 | That's like how we're drawing people in. |
| 1:08.5 | But the actual story that we're going to talk about today is basically the rise and fall |
| 1:12.8 | of a single food and nutrition researcher who was one of the most prominent people in this |
... |
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