Quote:
|
I read Redlan's linked articles and I do not see how they are conclusive.
|
I think this is one of the issues around how scientific knowledge is disseminated into the media and then received by the public at large.
If you read the headline (and this one is no different), then you could be forgiven for thinking that the results are definitive and beyond question. The headline in this case is
Cinnamon Does Not Control Blood Sugar Or Fat Levels unfortunately they forgot the very important phrase
appear to, which was in the original conclusion.
Nothing is ever conclusive. And a scientific fact is not the same as a lay persons fact. I found and rather liked this...
Quote:
Fact does not always mean the same thing as truth. Fact is a generally agreed-upon and seemingly obvious observation. It is a fact that things stick to the earth, without regard to why that happens. It was once a fact that the planets changed direction from time to time, and that the sun, planets and stars circled the earth once daily. This seemed obvious, and was generally agreed to be the case.
In time, the fact was changed, and it was then said that the earth circles the sun, and the planets only appear to change direction as they are passed by the earth in their orbits, or vise versa.
|
back to the study....
The meta study - i.e. a summary of 5 controlled studies did not find sufficient evidence that cinnamon controlled blood sugar.
Typically they will use the term statistical significance - i.e. the differences did not reach statistical significance. what they mean is that any differences were probably just down to chance. When they say the result was statistically significant they mean that there was a low probability that they got the result by chance (1 in 20 that the result occurred by chance is the typically accepted minimum).
and yes you've guessed it saying that a result is statistically significant does not mean that it did not occur purely by the chance.
which is why the authors have to add the all important
appears to in their conclusions.
the issue of the 90 days - there are at least 2 reasons for this.
Firstly it's cost. Double-blinded placebo trials are expensive, and the longer they go on, the more expensive they are. For something as controversial as a food having a pharmacological effect then you aren't going to get a lot of money for something that people know is unlikely to have any effect, but you might get some cash to conduct a stage I clinical trial, to see if there is anything there. The simple plain fact (and by this I mean an objective verifiable observation) is that the average plate of food, with flavourings from various barks and other plant parts, has no discernible effect on the body other than to stop you feeling hungry, which I think is rather marvelous all in itself. Double-blinded placebo controlled trials have drawn a blank when it comes to investigating the health properties of various foodstuffs, time and time and time again.
secondly - I do not know of a mechanism (except cumulative toxins) whereby a substance's pharmacological effect occurs outside of a 90 day window. Usually if you give someone something pharmacologically active it normally starts work straight away - the studies have chosen what is known as a surrogate end-points. A surrogate end-point is when you choose to measure something else other than the disease itself - HBa1C is a surrogate end-point - an A1c result does not in itself indicate that a person has complications from diabetes, but it does correlate with the risk that they might get them. the good thing about surrogate end-points is that they usually respond much faster to an intervention (i.e. cinnamon capsules) than the disease process itself.
on another point the blog entry - the no dose relationship is a big blow. Without dose relationship, there is no effect. It is the central tenet of pharmacology - give someone a low dose of something, then they will respond a little, give them a high dose, they should respond a lot.
In english then...
A few small studies indicate that cinnamon doesn't work. No one is going to be really interested in doing any longer/larger studies because a) nobody can remember a time when a foodstuff had a pharmacological effect on the body, and b) if it was going to do anything it should have shown up within 3 months, something, anything.
It's about as definitive as it gets, and by this I mean an objective verifiable observation
doesn't mean cinnamon doesn't lower blood sugar though.
