The phantom epidemic of child diabetes

Very interesting post from Junkfood Science.

The URL is http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/09/phantom-epidemic-of-child-diabetes.html

It appears that we have another "informational cascade" occurring in the US, just as we do here.

To remind you, an informational cascade is the ability of false and poorly evidenced information to gain credibility through being repeatedly retold as being true and correct.

It's the medical and scientific version of the urban myth, as discussed recently by the science writer of The New York Times.

So how exactly did it it happen that the false claim that there had been a ten-fold increase in the levels of type 2 diabetes amongst children in the USA gain currency and start to shape health reporting and policy there, when the July issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that rates over the last 20 years have remained steady?

And steady at very low rates. No more than a fraction of a percentage point.

As far as I can see, one of the reasons is our old statistical friend, the unrepresentative sample. So results from a study of a group of people who do not mirror the general population are nonetheless used as the base from which to extrapolate findings to the population at large.

Any innumerate idiot should be able to see the problem with this I would have thought.

But we live in an age beset by white middle-class panics, and one of the most shrill and hysterical (other than climate change) is obesity, and especially childhood obesity.

There's another false belief being put about widely at the moment, ie that obesity must be causing the increase in diabetes amongst children and young people.

But does that hard data support this view? Yet again, the answer is no.

Now, middle-class panics inevitably mutate into moral crusades. The trouble with moral crusades is that reason is one of their first casualties as what should be a rational issue decided by evidence is turned into a fight between good and evil.

Obesity is "evil" and must be the cause of all manner of afflictions and to dare say otherwise is not just to be wrong, a difference of opinion, but evil too.

And then there are the "availability entrepreneurs." Those who stand to profit in some way by stoking the fire. Unfortunately there are all too many health bureaucrats and academics who have built high profile and well paid careers from this sort of thing, and who are not going to let an opportunity to jump on the next funding bandwagon pass them by.

And all at a time when the most basic measure of our health continues its upward march.

Our lifespans.

We are living longer than ever before. And not just longer. Healthier too. All the actual data points overwhelmingly to this, and yet we are assailed on a daily basis about how our diets and additives and chemicals and what not are sending us all to an early grave.

It doesn't add up or make sense does it?