The Stock Market and Antioxidants
Two interesting things happened in the last 24 hours.
Well, actually, thousands of interesting things happened in the last 24 hours, but I'm going to focus on two.
The stock market had a mini crash- the Dow dropped 416 points, triggering panics everywhere. And a new study came out claiming that antioxidant supplements not only don't help anyone, but that they actually increase the risk of death.
The two events are not unrelated. And both say say far more about human behavior than they do about their respective subjects. Let me explain.
Let's start with the stock market.
Anyone who knows anything at all about investing knows that the stock market goes up and down and has all sorts of corrections, but, over time, without fail, over any time period longer than ten years, it shows a remarkable, consistent, predictable gain of about 10 percent (actually, a very real 6.8% above the 3% allowed for inflation, but who's counting)? Unfailingly. Even allowing for the crash of 1987.
No matter how you massage the data, the stock market goes up over time. Period. Done. While there are temporary fluctuations- which can seem scary when you're in the middle of them- the long term direction is unfailingly positive.
Therefore it's in an investor's rational interest to stay put when this stuff happens. But people don't behave rationally. They run out and sell, triggering all kinds of insane market behavior which is what happened yesterday. Meanwhile, smarter investors are laughing and saying, "hey, stocks are on sale! Woo-hah!"
Which brings me to antioxidants.
Yesterday's "study"- which is not a study but yet another very badly done 'meta-analysis'- looks at dozens of other studies and tries to draw some conclusions. Some of the studies included in this meta-analysis was the god-awful beta-carotene study in which they tested a bad, synthetic beta-carotene in a population of people who had been smoking 30 years and/or had been exposed to asbestos. Other of the studies included didn't control for type of antioxidant, baseline levels in the population, or dozens of other variables. It's unlikely most of these studies would pass muster if they were examined individually for methodology, but they were 'included' in the meta-analysis because they were available and because most people doing these studies aren't even aware of what questions to ask about the quality of the data, so they just go ahead and study whatever numbers are available.
For example, that recent "meta-analysis" that concluded that vitamin E doesn't do anything and may even increase the risk of death when taken over 150IU's looked at a dozen or so studies- none of which had shown any such thing- and then applied an almost never-used statistical method called a "quadratic-linearspline analysis" which is biased toward harm and almost never done in a meta-analysis, and came up with the prepostorous statement that vitamin E may increase the risk of death. This is like manipulating data to come up with the conclusion that water doesn't put out fire. (I have no doubt that with clever use of statistics, you could prove that statement as well). Sales of vitamin E supplements plummeted 40% after that one.
So here's the point.
Dozens and dozens of studies show what antioxidants do in the lab, in cells, in systems. Most studies of single nutrients in large populations are absolutely terrible and show very little. Some of this is connect-the-dots: give a rat cancer and he grows less tumors when exposed to substance A, it's probably a good thing to get substance A in the diet.
The problem with antioxidants isn't that they cause increased risk of death, which is such a preposterous statement I almost feel silly refuting it.
The problem is the incredible difficulty of doing well-controlled studies of single antioxidant supplements, and the ultimate uselessness of doing them in the first place, since most work in concert with one another, and may not perform particularly well in study designs that were originally meant to show the effect of pharmaceutical drugs on specific symptoms and conditions. That's not how antioxidants work.
On bulletin boards like the Vanguard Diehards board, where investors just shrug off these little "turbulences" in the market and tend to have a long-view, buy-and-hold strategy, there was much talk of the "crash" today. Most of it was on the order of this: "Woo-hah! Stocks are on sale! Let's buy more".
The stock market isn't crashing. It had a temporary drop and everyone panicked.
Antioxidants are going to continue to protect the body's cells and systems against oxidation and DNA damage, and hopefully one day we'll have better research to show exactly how they work.
In the meantime, you'll have to excuse me. I have to go take my vitamins with my fresh vegetable juice and raw eggs, after which I'm going to put some money in the market.
Stocks are on sale.
Well, actually, thousands of interesting things happened in the last 24 hours, but I'm going to focus on two.
The stock market had a mini crash- the Dow dropped 416 points, triggering panics everywhere. And a new study came out claiming that antioxidant supplements not only don't help anyone, but that they actually increase the risk of death.
The two events are not unrelated. And both say say far more about human behavior than they do about their respective subjects. Let me explain.
Let's start with the stock market.
Anyone who knows anything at all about investing knows that the stock market goes up and down and has all sorts of corrections, but, over time, without fail, over any time period longer than ten years, it shows a remarkable, consistent, predictable gain of about 10 percent (actually, a very real 6.8% above the 3% allowed for inflation, but who's counting)? Unfailingly. Even allowing for the crash of 1987.
No matter how you massage the data, the stock market goes up over time. Period. Done. While there are temporary fluctuations- which can seem scary when you're in the middle of them- the long term direction is unfailingly positive.
Therefore it's in an investor's rational interest to stay put when this stuff happens. But people don't behave rationally. They run out and sell, triggering all kinds of insane market behavior which is what happened yesterday. Meanwhile, smarter investors are laughing and saying, "hey, stocks are on sale! Woo-hah!"
Which brings me to antioxidants.
Yesterday's "study"- which is not a study but yet another very badly done 'meta-analysis'- looks at dozens of other studies and tries to draw some conclusions. Some of the studies included in this meta-analysis was the god-awful beta-carotene study in which they tested a bad, synthetic beta-carotene in a population of people who had been smoking 30 years and/or had been exposed to asbestos. Other of the studies included didn't control for type of antioxidant, baseline levels in the population, or dozens of other variables. It's unlikely most of these studies would pass muster if they were examined individually for methodology, but they were 'included' in the meta-analysis because they were available and because most people doing these studies aren't even aware of what questions to ask about the quality of the data, so they just go ahead and study whatever numbers are available.
For example, that recent "meta-analysis" that concluded that vitamin E doesn't do anything and may even increase the risk of death when taken over 150IU's looked at a dozen or so studies- none of which had shown any such thing- and then applied an almost never-used statistical method called a "quadratic-linearspline analysis" which is biased toward harm and almost never done in a meta-analysis, and came up with the prepostorous statement that vitamin E may increase the risk of death. This is like manipulating data to come up with the conclusion that water doesn't put out fire. (I have no doubt that with clever use of statistics, you could prove that statement as well). Sales of vitamin E supplements plummeted 40% after that one.
So here's the point.
Dozens and dozens of studies show what antioxidants do in the lab, in cells, in systems. Most studies of single nutrients in large populations are absolutely terrible and show very little. Some of this is connect-the-dots: give a rat cancer and he grows less tumors when exposed to substance A, it's probably a good thing to get substance A in the diet.
The problem with antioxidants isn't that they cause increased risk of death, which is such a preposterous statement I almost feel silly refuting it.
The problem is the incredible difficulty of doing well-controlled studies of single antioxidant supplements, and the ultimate uselessness of doing them in the first place, since most work in concert with one another, and may not perform particularly well in study designs that were originally meant to show the effect of pharmaceutical drugs on specific symptoms and conditions. That's not how antioxidants work.
On bulletin boards like the Vanguard Diehards board, where investors just shrug off these little "turbulences" in the market and tend to have a long-view, buy-and-hold strategy, there was much talk of the "crash" today. Most of it was on the order of this: "Woo-hah! Stocks are on sale! Let's buy more".
The stock market isn't crashing. It had a temporary drop and everyone panicked.
Antioxidants are going to continue to protect the body's cells and systems against oxidation and DNA damage, and hopefully one day we'll have better research to show exactly how they work.
In the meantime, you'll have to excuse me. I have to go take my vitamins with my fresh vegetable juice and raw eggs, after which I'm going to put some money in the market.
Stocks are on sale.
1 Comments:
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