In my stats classes, we discuss popular claims that have been proven/disproven by research. So, learning styles. Vitamins. One claim we dig into are the wide array of claims made about the health benefits of different foods and folk beliefs about nutrition. But how to get into it? That is such a big field, looking at different foods used for different conditions. Send your students to InformationIsBeautiful's Snake Oil Super foods , which sorted through all of good studies and created an interactive data viz to summarize. For instance, these are three foods, backed by science, for very specific issues: BUT GET THIS: If you scroll over any of them, you get a quick summary of the findings AND a link to the research article. See below for Oats. NOICE. The information isn't limited to slam dunks, either, it fleshes out promising foods and weak links as well. AND...this is great...below the visualization there is all sorts of information on their methodo...

This NPR story discusses research  detective work published JAMA . The JAMA article looked at a very influential NEJM review article that investigated the link between diet and Coronary Heart Disease. Specifically, whether sugar or fat contribute more to CHD. The article, written by Harvard researchers decades ago, pinned CHD on fatty diets. But the researchers took money from Big Sugar (which sounds like...a drag queen or CB handle) and communicated with Big Sugar while writing the review article. This piece discusses how conflict of interest shaped food research and our beliefs about the causes of CHD for decades. And how conflict of interest and institutional/journal prestige shaped this narrative. It also touches on how industry, namely sugar interests, discounted research that finds a sugar:CHD link while promoting and funding research that finds a fat:CHD link. How to use in a Research Methods class: -Conflict of interest. The funding received by the researchers from th...

Fivethirtyeight provides lots of beautiful pictures of spurious correlations found by their own in-house study. At the heart of this article are the limitations of a major tool use in nutritional research, the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). The author does a mini-study, enlisting the help of several co-workers and fivethirtyeight.com readers. They track track their own food for a week and reflect on how difficult it is to properly estimate and recall food (perhaps a mini-experiment you could do with your own students?). And she shares the spurious correlations she found in her own mini-research: Aschwanden also discusses how much noise and lack of consensus their is in real, published nutritional research (a good argument for why we need replication!):  http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/ How to use in class: -Short comings of survey research, especially survey research that relies on accurate memories -...

UPDATE, 9/22/22: Here is a non-paywalled link to this information:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/learning/whats-going-on-in-this-graph-oct-10-2017.html This article from the NYT is based on a survey . That survey asked a bunch of nutritionists if they considered certain foods healthy. Then they asked a bunch of everyday folks if they considered the same foods to be healthy. Then they generated the percentage of each group that considered the food healthy. And the NYT put the nutritionist responses on a Y-axis, and commoners on the X, and made a lovely scatterplot... Nutritionists and non-nutritionists agree that chocolate chip cookies are not healthy. However, nutritionists are far more critical of American cheese than are non-nutritionists.  ...and provided us with the raw data as well.