Thursday, August 04, 2016

Sorry Corn Refiners Association, Chocolate Milk Doesn't Increase Intelligence

From the annals of corporate sponsored research comes this gem that was sponsored by the Corn Refiners Association,
"No Effect of Sugar Sweetened Milk on Performance of a Battery of Cognitive Assessment Tests".
Unfortunately for the Corn Refiners, no amount of p-hacking saw chocolate milk increasing brain function.

While undeniably there's great research out there that is and was funded by industry, including the food industry, there's really only one purpose for research like this - sales.

There's no doubt that if even the tiniest change had been found, the finding would have served industry as a talking and marketing point, just as was the case with the Welch's study that had them claiming grape juice gave working mothers better memories.

Those ends certainly aren't a mystery to the researchers who run these studies. And probably not a my$tery either as to why researchers agree to run them.

Maybe by way of a blind universal fund, or by way of sugar-sweetened beverage tax revenues, or by more innovative approaches (see below), we need to find new ways to fund research because clearly, research funding is broken, and it needs fixing.