We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

For anyone interested in the new Dietary Guidelines, here's a breakdown and my thoughts: kcklatt.substack.com/p/ambiguous-...

Meta-analyses of dietary exposures must consider energy adjustment (preprint) 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2512.07531 In observational studies, adjustment for energy intake changes the nature of the effect being estimated – from addition (increasing or decreasing intake of that food while...

‪It has a name now 😜 Many thanks to Ken for agreeing to put his good name to my...artwork. The image is in the public domain (CC 0), but citations to the linked documents are warmly welcomed. ✅ zenodo.org/records/1808... ✅ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24452418/

Interesting finding: A rather odd meta-analysis in which not a single study meets their inclusion criteria, and nearly 100% of the data presented is incorrect. I have genuinely no idea how the heck you could end up with this (AI hallucinations? Something else?) pubpeer.com/publications...

Thrilled to share my latest paper entitled, "Estimating Discrimination in Sentencing: Distinguishing between Good and Bad Controls" Led by @jpinasanchez.bsky.social, the paper introduces a framework for examining discrimination in criminal justice processes. 🧵 1/10 publicera.kb.se/ejels/articl...

We did a thing. 😬

Remember that cruciferous vegetables and cancer study I wrote about recently? Turns out it's even more borked than I said. Some excellent sleuthing here, the study probably needs to be retracted or extensively corrected.

Hey @gidmk.bsky.social, following this post, I dug into the study further, and it turns out there are a *lot* more issues with it. Only one of the estimates used is actually what they claim it is (odds ratio for the association between highest vs lowest intake of cruciferous veg and colon cancer)..

My thread on the Neurology paper on sweeteners & cognitive health: skywriter.blue/pages/did:pl... And a follow-up thread on some weird patterns in the Appendix tables: skywriter.blue/pages/did:pl... Collated by Skywriter onto a web page for easier reading!

This year's Annual Review of Nutrition is out and full of really great reads. My contribution details the broad history of nutritional guidance in America & covers the forces (science/politics/culture) that have driven the evolution of nutrition guidance. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Nice summary of our new paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on milk consumption and cardiovascular disease mortality in #Norway 🥛 medicalxpress.com/news/2025-08... #nutrition #cardiology

Academic gut-health microbiome research has not really led to efficacious treatments for specific ailments that can be demonstrated in rigorous studies. But they *have* convinced the public that gut health is somehow, vaguely at the root of all illness, and food companies have profited off this.

I made a little video about the chap who trusted chatGPT to give him safe tips for better health. It did not go well. Live on @nebula.tv now! If you sign up via this link, it helps me too :) If you're already a member, chatGPT said watching this will lower your cholesterol nebula.tv/videos/medli...

New article by me! Cardiovascular disease mortality rates have declined by around three-quarters since 1950, but we rarely hear about it. I explore some of the reasons behind the decline. ourworldindata.org/cardiovascul...

Saturated fat LIES (and how to see through them) A recent study suggests saturated fat is harmless and has been unfairly demonized Here´s what the influencers will never tell you, and how to protect your health and your loved ones https://youtu.be/taaEOY5E5Iw

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

454 Hints That a Chatbot Wrote Part of a Biomedical Researcher’s Paper Scientists show that the frequency of a set of words seems to have increased in published study abstracts since ChatGPT was released into the world. #giftlink www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/h...

Elon Musk casually, and illegally, dismantled USAID. According to a new study in the Lancet, that action will lead to *14 million* premature deaths between 2025 and 2030. Again: Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children.

My student sent me this and I can't unsee it, so I am blessing the bluesky timeline with this so that I will not be alone

We just published a critical review of the KETO-CTA study — the first study to examine coronary plaque progression in Lean Mass Hyper-Responders (LMHRs) on a ketogenic diet. Here’s why we believe the study’s results have been seriously misrepresented. 1/14

When two surgeons marry each other (troubling, but it happens), how do you figure out which one is the better operator? These things are important, we must know!! Thank goodness we have numbers to look at, because numbers never lie. Right? 🚨NEW VIDEO🚨 youtu.be/F6Y_bpE3r5c?...

Happy 18th birthday ggplot2! #rstats

Having read the full MAHA report, what stands out the most to me, as an epidemiologist, is how inexplicably sloppy it is. The US government collects data on every health condition you can think of, and the report doesn’t use any of it.

Oh, it's already happened: A large Norwegian city wrote a report on school closures which cited a slew of AI-hallucinated papers - and this op-ed praised the AI for "pointing to spaces of knowledge", as a way to "inspire and invite the [future] papers we need". www.nordnorskdebatt.no/tromso-feile...

Dietary context in the association between red meat consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40320163/

Well, this seems like a perfectly reasonable DAG...

Fortunate to contribute to this edition of @annualreviews.bsky.social and the timing couldn't be more serendipitous as nutrition is at the forefront of many folks' minds and there is active conversations about what future Dietary Guidelines should look like. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

As soon as RFK Jr was appointed, it was only a matter of time before Wakefield 2.0 was offered a role in the Trump administration. But still, it is shocking to see.

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

My prediction: once vaccines are “proven” to cause autism, the people in the “autism registry” will begin receiving information about “better ways to manage autism.” RFK Jr has made clear he’s not pursuing socialized medicine because he thinks the free market is a better option for health care. 🧵

"We'll just terraform Mars," they insist, unable to terraform Earth, a planet that is already perfect except it's like 2° too warm.

My proudest work. Have a lot of old Schulenstreit memes that are "enraged psychoanalysts send messages to my superiors" worthy, not sure if I should post them here 😂

Aetiology of type 2 diabetes: an experimental medicine odyssey "This review describes a prolonged research endeavour to test the twin cycle hypothesis that type 2 diabetes is caused by fat-induced dysfunction of the liver and pancreas" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The anti-vaccine crowd say they just want to “see the evidence” in the form of placebo-controlled randomized trials. But we've done these trials. And we know our vaccines work. Which is precisely why we can't use placebo to test better vaccines. Read more: epiellie.substack.com/p/first-do-n...

Exactly a year ago, a paper claimed apple cider vinegar was as effective as Ozempic for weight loss. *Clearly wrong.* This is the story of exactly one year of dealing with this paper. And the very normal, very complete failure of governance that resulted. open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

Very excited to share my latest paper, led by @georgiatomova.bsky.social, comparing approaches for analysing 'compositional data' published in @biomedcentral.bsky.social Medical Research Methodology. More details below! 🧵 1/ bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #EpiSky #StatsSky

ScienceGuardians is a platform describing itself as the "first fully verified journal club" dedicated to fighting the "PubPeer Network Mob". They boast of a stringent verification process. On a whim, I registered an account for Larry Richardson, my grandma's cat. It was approved in 2 hours.

An excellent overview, very snappily edited, exploring the explosion in BS health influencers & understanding why they’re not trustworthy. Featuring me and two of my favourite people in this online medical world, Dr Simi Adedeji & Dr Andrea Love @drandrealove.bsky.social youtu.be/1gEdPlDnFKs?...

New video out on the Keto and heart disease study (aka LMHR). Findings, FAQs and what it all means. check out the full video below incl. my chat with the senior author Dr. Matthew Budoff clarifying several standing issues 🔽

Some of my favorite studies by @kevinh-phd.bsky.social 1) “Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity” (2015) www.cell.com/cell-metabol...

After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology.

If you're keeping track of the long list of things this admin's done that flies in the face of MAHA, censoring and ultimately losing the top intramural nutrition scientist studying food processing and health is definitely towards the top.

I've never seen a ton of bricks come down so hard on a study. In it, keto enthusiasts test their theory that very high LDL isn't as risky in lean, metabolically healthy people on keto diets as it is in others. The test: plaque progression in that cohort. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is from a published randomized trial with 138 citations.

Tariffs xkcd.com/3073

today we will all read imbens 2021 on statistical significance and p values, which is a strong contender for having the best opening paragraph of any stats paper pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

This week's E is for Epi newsletter is out now! In it, I pick apart all the things* wrong with one of the worst papers I've ever read. How bad is it? Well RFK Jr loves it... open.substack.com/pub/epiellie... ___ *actually, not ALL the things wrong with it. Because the article gets too long!

This is such an important article, about the simplistic visions now pushing aside scientific research and complex social issues. A must read. newrepublic.com/article/1933...

2/ Mostly co-authored with JM Bland, as of 2018 there were 68 articles with over 10 000 citations. www-users.york.ac.uk/~mb55/pubs/s... www-users.york.ac.uk/~mb55/pubs/p...