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Commonsense is now science?

One website I often browse is ScienceDaily.

This site is a repository for press releases from all sorts of companies, universities and other organisations involved in scientific research or technology development. As a result, there are frequently a few interesting new studies or innovations which appear on that site and worthy of mention in a column like this.

However, I've noticed of late that there's also an awful lot of stuff that barely qualifies as science and falls more into the category of "this is news?".

For example...

Today, ScienceDaily carried a piece reporting on a University of South Australia study that revealed the fact that Cardio-fitness cuts death and disease by nearly 20%.

This comes as news to anyone?

Perhaps the only thing this study does is quantify to some degree the effect that being fit has on your likelihood of dying. I think it's fair to say that we already knew that fit people tend to live longer than those who are unfit.

Use of the phrase "groundbreaking new research" in this report is patently ridiculous and it simply codifies what commonsense already tells us.

Another of these "tell us something we didn't already know" reports is titled New research shows 'profound' link between dietary choices and brain health.

Ya think?

Once again, this is something I think we already knew yet the University of Warwick seems to have felt this worthy of an announcement. What I found disappointing is that there was no mention of the effect of diet on gut biome. Many other studies seem to point that it may well be the fact that a varied diet creates a healthier collection of bacteria in the gut and it is those bacteria, rather than the food, which is the truly important factor here.

There are however, some more interesting and insightful pieces on ScienceDaily this week, although even they tend to be based on existing knowledge.

For example, those who have embraced a ketogenic diet will know of the health benefits that this can produce. Sugar and many other forms of carbohydrate tend to be over-consumed in Western diets and there's now a trend to encourage high protein diets, especially for those who are "getting on a bit".

This piece, titled Component of keto diet plus immunotherapy may reduce prostate cancer joins a number of dots and indicates that ketones may well be an effective aid to cancer treatment, especially difficult to treat forms such as prostate cancer.

Note to self: time to get back on a ketogenic diet!

Unfortunately ScienceDaily is a bit of a firehose of sci/tech announcements and as such, it really does pay to take some of what's published here with a grain of salt. Most of the stuff you read on its pages are press releases by the bodies involved and I suspect it's often part of an attempt to raise extra funding. For that reason we can always expect to see "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary" thrown into reports on "things we already knew" studies.

So long as one remembers this, it's still a good website if you like to keep up to date with what researchers and scientists are doing.

Carpe Diem folks!

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