Don’t wear black socks
When my wife was taking some courses in nutrition at UPEI she would often bring home nuggets of wisdom that tended to cause us to eat food closer and closer to alfalfa. Generally, when I heard that she had picked up a tidbit from class I would shudder at the pending switch in foodstuffs. There is one occasion (well, more than one, but I am going to write about one now) when I enjoyed the nugget of wisdom. It went something like this
there is a study that has shown that men who wear black socks are more likely to have heart disease
This would be a good time to point out that I do not know if this study exists and if it does I do not have a reference to it. The point the professor was making is that some types of studies are “epidemiological studies” that attempt to correlate various factors of human populations in order to discover causal relationships between these factors. In other words, get a bunch of people and look at what is the same (or different for that matter) for that bunch of people and see if there is a reason for for the sameness (or difference).
If it turns out that men with black socks are more likely to have heart disease (which might be true) it does not mean that black socks cause a higher incidence of heart disease. There is a correlation but not a causal relationship. Another favourite of mine is the assumption that the crowing of a rooster causes the morning to arrive. The rooster always crows before daybreak and the day always comes. That is a slightly different argument that suggests timing implies a causal relationship (post hoc ergo prompter hoc) but I like it as an example, even if it does not prove anything about heart disease or epidemiological studies.
All of this would mean very little if it were not for the fact that I was catching up on XKCD and came across the above comic a couple of hours after I had a relatively long discussion with my aforementioned wife about High-Fructose Corn Syrup and the correlation (though potentially not causal relationship) with North American obesity. You may be jealous or relieved you do not have such conversations with your partner–I think you should be jealous, but that is just me.
Anyhow, I am still no fan of HFCS and I am not going to wear black socks. You have been warned.
