Non-nutritive sweeteners: The pain continues

It’s been 2 weeks since the systematic review and meta-analysis on non-nutritive sweeteners was published. Let’s look at what happened on how it was reported. If you are interested in my interpretation of the July 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Canadian Medical Journal, which is what these media examples were reporting on, the link is here. Read More...

Non-nutritive sweeteners: This is going to hurt.

This is going to hurt. Read More...

The long-anticipated fall of the systematic review

You may have noticed that for a blog that is called “Evidence-Based Fitness”, that there is not one single mention or reference to the “Hierarchy of Evidence” pyramid.  This is entirely intentional. I can’t count the number of blog drafts that I’ve tried to write and then scrapped on how much I hated the old “hierarchy of evidence”. But this week, the Evidence-Based Medicine “pyramid” has finally been reworked. It’s not as graphically pretty. It does, however, better reflect the reality of the “this is not actually how it works” pyramid of old. The new infographic was revealed and can be found here (it’s even open access!) So what does this  new infographic mean?

In a nutshell, it means there are no more simple answers and no more simple classifications. It means you can’t skip steps. It hopefully means an end to the blind application of a clearly dysfunctional classification system to interpret and compare studies to one another. Read More...

Systematic Reviews: All that glitters is not gold.

Photo credit: http://www.luckypanner.com

This is a short article I submitted to Science-Based Medicine a couple of years ago, which never made it to their blog and then I forgot about it. But then I came across it and figured I should use it since I already did the work; and lately there seem to be a lot of systematic reviews being published. Read More...