Gentlemen, I am glad we have stopped being 'offended' at each other. It is a deep-rooted disease of current political debate. Everyone who does not root their argument in strict logical pre-defined terms with lashings of support data offends me, and all the ghosts of renaissance thinking, way back to the classical philosophers, but I don't go on about it.....
Now:
"..D.G. I don't think SWMBO would argree with your witless answer..."
"..DG must be right Geoff, after all he does know everything about everthing..."I have never claimed that I am always right, but I do try to think about my comments, and always try to provide appropriate supporting evidence...
"..Im surprised D.G. that you didn't quote this website to support your argument as everything on the internet is "true"."Hmm... I checked your proposal on PubMedCentral. It has no cites. Professor Ioannidis' paper, on the other hand, with 90 odd cites, is the most downloaded technical paper from PLoS Medicine. Goodman and Greenland's criticisims of it have been satisfactorly answered here -
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1896210/ . So, on the whole, I think that the Ioannidis paper is more appropriate for my purposes.
I also have difficulty understanding sarcasm.....
"PMK you don't have to go Texas - there are plenty here and they are costing the NHS a fortune in treatment. If the trend to obesity continues there is the possibility that treatment for obesity will be the single biggest drain on the budget."Hmm.. trends are difficult things to discuss at the best of times. However, the item below may be of interest:
"...According to the lastest results from the Health Survey for England, regarded as the best source of information on the topic, obesity rates have fallen. Yet you could have been forgiven for failing to notice: it’s barely been reported. After all the sensationalist headlines over the past few years about an ‘obesity timebomb’, would it be too much to expect some balanced reporting over the fact that the aforementioned explosive might not be going off after all?
The latest figures, published last Thursday (17 Dec 2010), show that in 2009, 22.1 per cent of men were obese compared to 24.1 per cent in 2008 and 23.7 per cent in 2006, the year before that Foresight report was published. For women, the new figure was 23.9 per cent as against 24.9 per cent in 2008 and 24.2 per cent in 2006.
But what about the future? Perhaps our children are still getting fatter? Although the UK uses a rather broader definition of ‘child obesity’ than is standard internationally, the rates for this seem to be heading downwards, too. In 2004, 19.4 per cent of boys aged two to 15 were regarded as obese; in 2009, that figure was down to 16.1 per cent. The equivalent figures for girls were 18.5 per cent (2004) and 15.3 per cent (2009)..."
Rob Lyons - SpikedI often wonder why people are content to believe data which is provided for them by interested parties such as drug companies, politicians, journalists and other snake-oil salesmen, rather than going to the basic information which is often quite readily available.