So clearly the less contraversial topics gainittle interest; the scientific method influences policy decisions all the time, yet even this un-contraversial issue is something which scientist find very hard to explain.

What does our society do about this failure to communicate?

I wish he didn't waste 4 minutes telling me what the randomised control trial was and spent hardly any time at all telling us what the supposed 12 trials actually were or where we could find them.

I actually think he's wrong, based on a similar argument to carbon and climate change. We know carbon is a greenhouse gas so we can be pretty certain that shoving countless tons into the atmosphere will make things different. In the same way we know sugar is full of energy, so we can be pretty sure that filling a kid with it will make things different. Indeed, there is an entire industry in the world of sport dedicated to making athletes eat the right foods because it will have an effect on how they can get energy into their bodies.

"More studies than for for any drug you've ever taken"

So bloody what? You could have 100 studies of a handful of people and combined they wouldn't achieve as much as 1 good study with a large number of subjects. He will have to do a lot more than that to convince me that something apparently obvious isn't true. Until someone presents me with a study that claims to prove this and allows me to judge its merits I see no reason to change my mind.

@oct, sorry if four minutes explaining something was a waste of your time. You appear to be out of the target audience. And again, not listing the actually studies is something which could have been useful for you, but i'm not sure the audience would have appreciated (or at least i'm assuming that was a decision made by the author.)

of course a quick search on google scholar should solve that.
here's a link from a review of other studies done in '86
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0272735886900346

How far can stupidity be amplified?
'sblood! How enervating to hear this hyper-actively spluttering dude teach us in his oh so patiently condescending way that we must use *science* if we want to *prove* anything.
Apparently he has struggled hard to get taught (I wonder how many cups of coffee it took to keep him awake for the grinding) and now he is giving it back to us, he'll teach us: You know... "unless you make a ran-do-mized con-trol tri-al, you can't prove a causal link between one thing and another." Unless you make a ran-do-mi-zed cont-rol tri-al you don't know a thing, honey, it isn't a *study*, it's an *anecdote*. Anecdote is not *data*.

Well, the whole issue, as he presents it, concerns whether sugar makes kids(!) "hyper-active". These very "scientific" guys that are above "anecdote" apparently don't need any definition of "hyper-active". They go straight to the point: Parents that claim kids to be "hyper-active" because of sugar are only "anecdotal" testimonies, and therefore they might be wrong, maybe the kids weren't "hyper-active" after all, they could have *seen* "hyper-activity" even if it wasn't there.
(Most splendid of all is when he says that maybe it was not the sugar in itself, but the *taste* that could have made them "hyper-active".)

This is a totally formal mockery of a "critical" and "scientific" argument since there is no clue to and no interest in what "hyper-active" here means. This guy (and "science") for some reason only wants to reassure that it is not proven that sugar causes it, whatever it is, to kids (and in the bargain he gets to make a display of how well taught he is. He has been intelligent and passed the exam in theory of science.)

Well, we can see what the whole thing is really about from the text that ora links to
"Sugar and hyperactivity: A critical review of empirical findings"

"...Although the results of correlational studies suggested that high levels of sugar consumption may be associated with increased rates of inappropriate behavior..."

There it is! "hyper-activity" = "inappropriate behaviour"


the results of dietary challenge studies have been inconsistent and inconclusive. Most studies have failed to find any effects associated with sugar ingestion, and the few studies that have found effects have been as likely to find sugar improving behavior as making it worse.

"effects" is apparently defined in relation to "improved" or "worsened" "behaviour". If "data" (not "anecdotal" mind you, *randomizedly control trialled*!) shows parents experiencing their kids "behaviour" as not worsened, maybe even improved when they taste candy, the conclusion is that sugar has not made the kids "hyper-active".

Uh?

But what Octavious said - that's where we could be talking science if there is still reason to give any respect to this word:
"In the same way we know sugar is full of energy, so we can be pretty sure that filling a kid with it will make things different" (Yeah, and why just "a kid"?)
That is looking at the thing itself , not just hurrying to tell if the thing is "good" or "bad" regardless of what it might be in itself. They are eager to say that sugar is (perhaps) not "bad" it is "good" and nothing more. They won't use their senses and understanding further than that.
And the length they go to in their self-annihilation is that they won't even admit themselves the authority to decide what is good or bad for themselves - it can only be seen from the outside perspective of "good or bad behaviour" according to your superiors (in this case parents). The thing that makes you "behave" is a good thing.
That is all their "science" is there for to tell you about.

I love it when people think they can refute entire studies with a paragraph of bullshit.

@ Ora

That's lovely, but all I can get is the abstract. An abstract that says correlational studies suggest sugar consumption is linked with behaviour, and the various dietary challenge studies say, rather unhelpfully, that there is no link, there is a negative link, and there is a positive link.

It then goes on to say it has suggestions for future research

To me this article's message is more "science doesn't know" than "science has proven it to be a myth".

"This is a totally formal mockery of a "critical" and "scientific" argument since there is no clue to and no interest in what "hyper-active" here means. This guy (and "science") for some reason only wants to reassure that it is not proven that sugar causes it, whatever it is, to kids "

Yeah, you ask parents to report levels of hyperactivity, and you find
A) kids who have had sugar are no more hyperactive than kids who haven't - according to the parent's reporting.
and
B) Parents who are told their kids had sugar have higher reported levels of hyperactivity those whose parent's are told they did not have sugar.

Conclusion, it is the perception that sugar causes hyperactivity which causes higher reporting of hyperactivity, not the ingestion of sugar.

Now it is possible to imagine/suggest/hypothesise that parents who don't let their kids have sugar, see more excitement and 'hyperactivity' when their kids do get sugar, because to those kids it is a big treat (and they like the taste, of course, some kids might associate the taste with puking up, but only if they have been regularly forced to over-eat and gotten sick)

'That's lovely, but all I can get is the abstract.' - yeah, i know that there is a problem with access to journals; they are usually behind a paywall.

'To me this article's message is more "science doesn't know" than "science has proven it to be a myth".' - fair point, i haven't read more recent research; and i can only give the above anecdote (of what a friend said to me lately about the issue)

@ Draug

That's an interesting link, but again there are no details of the actual study. There was an interesting BBC article a while back supposedly dispelling the myth that sugar makes you hyper is a myth, but whilst it poured scorn on many of these studies it also failed (assuming I recall correctly) to actually show any of them.

It is the greatest tragedy of science that the public is denied access to so much of our work, and then we wonder why they lose interest...

@Octavious, there is a movement afoot to reverse the payment system for publishing, but unfortunately, the alternative system (ie having journals where scientists pay to publish, and the papers are available publicly) is open to people publishing whatever they want, so long as they pay for it.

They are in essence paying for peer-reviewers, the actual publishing and distributing is not an issue... I imagine a third-way is needed.

Thanks for sorting out what is your perspective on this, Ora.
To my understanding I was in perfect agreement with Octavious (although I think he seems unnecessarily courteous.), but I was puzzled to what was Ora's intention with this post.
But if his interest was focused on the behaviour of parents when trying to explain kids (mis)behaviour, then I am in full understanding with Ora too.

Only, then it is no way a study on the effects of sugar on the human organism, but a psychological study of the behaviour of parents.
This is two totally different things, and beware to mix them up and arrive at strange "scientific" conclusions:

Observation: Parents tend to blame any bothers they have with their kids on them eating sugar
Conclusion: Sugar has no effect on the human organism