First, and I really want to like this paper, but I find it lacking (at least in commentary and discussion if not for their somewhat dubious assumptions):
The word “mask” appears exactly 0 times in the manuscript.
For a study on self-reported behaviors and their link to infection risk, I would think the bare minimum is asking participants at least a few basic questions about their masking behavior. Even if there isn’t a standardized survey they could pull from another work’s methods section, it should be pretty easy to have respondents report how often they mask when in an enclosed space with people who don’t live in their household. Without a reason to discount potential associations between diet and mask-wearing, this seems like a major oversight.
There’s no effort to rule out socioeconomic variability as a confounding factor.
Definitely some odd things about it. It also seems to not exactly match other studies that found plant-based diets reduce severity rather than occurrence. Might be asymptomatic/low severity cases that aren’t being reported
Intuitively it makes sense that vegans/vegetarians would have a lower death rate, but it doesn’t for them to have a lower incidence or Long-COVID incidence rate
This reminds me of the obesity factor, where obesity only plays a role if you’re vulnerable to the virus in the first place (by increasing chance of death). But there are still millions of obese people walking around who are pretty unaffected by COVID
A basic food frequency questionnaire served as a tool for validation of the main self-reported dietetic pattern. The omnivorous were those who consumed any food of animal origin. The plant-based food pattern included flexitarian/semi-vegetarian (individuals who consumed meat at a frequency ≤3 times a week)
lmao why can’t they actually define terms properly
First,
and I really want to like this paper, but I find it lacking (at least in commentary and discussion if not for their somewhat dubious assumptions):
The word “mask” appears exactly 0 times in the manuscript.
For a study on self-reported behaviors and their link to infection risk, I would think the bare minimum is asking participants at least a few basic questions about their masking behavior. Even if there isn’t a standardized survey they could pull from another work’s methods section, it should be pretty easy to have respondents report how often they mask when in an enclosed space with people who don’t live in their household. Without a reason to discount potential associations between diet and mask-wearing, this seems like a major oversight.
There’s no effort to rule out socioeconomic variability as a confounding factor.
Definitely some odd things about it. It also seems to not exactly match other studies that found plant-based diets reduce severity rather than occurrence. Might be asymptomatic/low severity cases that aren’t being reported
Edit: actually it does seem to line up with this meta analysis (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.28298) but I can’t find it in sci hub to compare details
Intuitively it makes sense that vegans/vegetarians would have a lower death rate, but it doesn’t for them to have a lower incidence or Long-COVID incidence rate
This reminds me of the obesity factor, where obesity only plays a role if you’re vulnerable to the virus in the first place (by increasing chance of death). But there are still millions of obese people walking around who are pretty unaffected by COVID
lmao why can’t they actually define terms properly
Indeed.
fucking seriously
I’ve seen so much shoddy crap in journals that I don’t trust anything unless I’m looking at the raw data
I remember an anthropology paper about the rise of pastoralism, and they cited the vitamin D in milk as a factor lol
It was in an actual paper too, like the ones that get posted on NCBI
those are some pretty big flaws for sure, but still 39%, jesus
Yeah and I don’t think the work is totally meritless. I definitely have terminal-paper-reviewer-brain.