Here we go again with the latest “Meat Kills!” study. You may have already seen it reported in the news with headlines like Vegetarians cut heart disease risk. Here are some quotes from that article:
Vegetarians are nearly a third less likely than meat-eaters to die or be hospitalized from heart disease, British researchers report this week in another study supporting a plant-based diet.
Vegetarians have lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, weigh less and are less likely to have diabetes, as well, the researchers report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
The study, which covers 45,000 people over an average of 11 years from the 1990s through 2009, shows that vegetarians were 28 percent less likely to develop heart disease over that time.
Well, that’s it, then. Drop the burger, pick up the tofu meat substitute, and save your heart.
Nawww, let’s read on:
“The results clearly show that the risk of heart disease in vegetarians is about a third lower than in comparable non-vegetarians,” said Tim Key, deputy director of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford.
The researchers said they accounted for age, smoking, drinking, exercise, educational level and socioeconomic background in making their calculations. Over the 11 or so years, 1,235 of the volunteers were diagnosed with heart disease, and 169 died of heart disease – the No. 1 cause of death in both Europe and the United States.
In the disclosures section of the full study, Tim Key (quoted above) is listed as a member of the Vegetarian Society, United Kingdom. That makes me a wee bit suspicious … although Chris Gardner of Stanford is also a vegetarian, and he conducted the clinical trial of four different diets that found the Atkins dieters lost the most weight and showed the greatest improvements in their cardiovascular risk factors. Dr. Key isn’t necessarily biased just because he promotes vegetarian diets.
So let’s look at this particular study and ask ourselves some Science For Smart People questions:
Q: Is this a clinical study or an observational study?
A: It’s an observational study based on questionnaires and medical records. We can’t make conclusions about cause and effect from observational studies, but at least in this case the researchers aren’t asking the study subjects to accurately remember everything they ate during the past several years. Most people can surely give an accurate answer to the question “Have you been a vegetarian for at least the past five years?”
That being said, comparisons of vegetarians versus non-vegetarians are always likely to produce skewed results for the simple reason that vegetarians tend to be more health-conscious than the population as a whole. That means they’re different in all kinds of ways. Not eating meat is just one of them.
Q: Did the researchers control their variables?
A: Not really, no. In the full text of the study, the researchers admit that the participants are not a representative sample of the British adult population. In fact, both the vegetarians and non-vegetarians in the study population had lower-than-usual rates of heart disease. Then there’s this little issue:
Risk factors such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes may be mediating factors through which vegetarianism affects the risk of IHD; therefore, the analyses were not adjusted for these variables.
In other words, since we believe meat-eating causes hypertension, hyperlipidemia and diabetes, we didn’t adjust for any of them. When I read that sentence, I scoured the study to see if rates of diabetes were reported. Yup … and the non-vegetarians (let’s just call them meat-eaters from here on) had more than double the rate of diabetes.
Now … since diabetics are three times more likely to die of heart disease than non-diabetics, do you think maybe we have a confounding variable here? If you believe eating meat causes diabetes (as the vegetarian researcher probably does), then yes, you could choose to ignore that as a variable. But if you believe diabetes is caused by excess sugar consumption, you can’t.
Since clinical studies have shown that low-carb, meaty diets can control and often reverse diabetes, I seriously doubt eating meat causes diabetes. So what we’re likely seeing here is that the vegetarians consume less sugar than the meat-eaters – once again, comparing health-conscious people to the population as a whole.
Then there’s the age problem. Here’s the breakdown of the study participants with their average ages at the time they were enrolled:
6,831 non-vegetarian men, average age = 49.5
22,610 non-vegetarian women, average age = 46.3
3,771 vegetarian men, average age = 41.8
11,349 vegetarian women, average age = 38.4
With a little Excel magic, I determined that the overall average age of the meat-eaters at the beginning of the study was 47 years old. The overall average age of the vegetarians at the beginning of the study was 39 years old.
The researchers compared their medical records 11 years later. At that point, the average meat-eater was 58 years old and the average vegetarian was 50 years old. Now take a look at the chart below, which shows CDC figures on heart-disease deaths rates by age bracket.
The heart-disease death rate in the 55-64 year-old-bracket is more than double the rate in the 45-54 year-old-bracket. The meat-eaters were far more likely to fall into the age group where the rate of heart-disease death more than doubles.
Ahhh, but the researchers assured us they adjusted the data for age, gender, BMI and smoking status. Perhaps, but I have my doubts. Those “adjustments” are where a lot of mathematical manipulations occur, as Dr. John Ioannidis has pointed out in his criticisms of observational studies.
Here’s part of the reason I have my doubts: in the study, the researchers made this statement:
On the basis of the absolute rates of hospitalization or death from IHD, the cumulative probability of IHD between ages 50 and 70 y was 6.8% for nonvegetarians compared with 4.6% for vegetarians.
“Absolute rates” means no adjustment for age or anything else. And yet the meat-eaters, who fall into the 55-64 age group on average, had a heart-disease rate of 6.8%, while the vegetarians, who fall into the 45-54 age group on average, had a heart-disease rate of 4.6%.
Hmmm … the CDC chart shows heart-disease deaths more than doubling as we move from one age bracket to the next (an increase of 131%), yet our older meat-eaters were just 32% more likely to have heart disease than their younger vegetarian counterparts, according to the study. Something doesn’t feel right here. Given the difference in average age, the difference in death rates in the non-adjusted data ought to be more dramatic.
Oh, but wait … if you read the study, the researchers weren’t comparing death rates. They were comparing a diagnosis of heart disease – a combination of deaths chalked up to heart disease and heart-related problems such as angina. In fact, of their 1,235 medical data points, just 169 were actual heart-disease deaths. Which leads me to our next question:
Q: Is there any important data that seems to be missing?
A: Oh, you betcha. The researchers had medical records for diagnoses of heart-related problems, they had medical records for heart-disease deaths, they knew who was and wasn’t a vegetarian, and they dutifully reported the differences in all heart-related problems combined for meat-eaters versus vegetarians … and yet stunningly, they didn’t report the difference in death rates – not for heart-disease deaths, and not for deaths from any cause.
Never fear. This isn’t the first time these researchers dug into the data they collected for the purpose of publishing a paper. Here’s the conclusion from another study using the same dataset titled Mortality Among British Vegetarians:
The mortality of both the vegetarians and the nonvegetarians in this study is low compared with national rates. Within the study, mortality from circulatory diseases and all causes is not significantly different between vegetarians and meat eaters, but the study is not large enough to exclude small or moderate differences for specific causes of death, and more research on this topic is required.
In other words, We’d like more funding so we can keep torturing the data until it tells us that eating meat will kill you.
Go enjoy your steak.
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I’d just like to point something out :
FISH = MEAT
Now, are there any studies which actually study vegetarians?
I always like to reverse the numbers in these studies. Truth is regardless of what you eat after 11 years 99% of you will still be alive! A little perspective is always a good thing.
I also like to point out that nearly 100% of the people who died in the past 10 years ate carrots and broccoli at some point in their lives.
I’m afraid there is a little misspelling in the name of the famous Greek researcher: it’s not Dr. John Ionnidis but Dr. John Ioannidis (or Dr John P. A. Ioannidis, to give his full handle!).
Sorry to nit-pick, but “Google oblige”!
Nit-pick away. I’d rather get the man’s name right, thanks.
Great Job……once again. My question is this……….
As an analysis of a longer larger study about Cancer and Nutrition…….why the headlines about heart disease? Could it be that their own cancer – nutrition for vegetarians versus meat eaters may have not come out the way they desired….so better to massage data and make headlines with something else?
Can you tell that I am a tad cynical?
If you’re not cynical, you’re not paying attention.
There is a new trend about vegans. They offer you to watch long and annoying videos. Some of vegan-wackos made insane amount of videos which are impossible to watch and especially to listen, fortunately, there is a written text, which is still super-annoying to read.
http://www.plantpositive.com/
I realized, it is necessary to stop being polite when it comes to vegan propaganda. Why not to declare, sorry, but my mind is closed to certain things , period.
I don’t watch their videos or read their articles anymore either. It’s always the same old cherry-picked, observational nonsense.
Great breakdown, I’m going to post this to my facebook group.
I sometimes find all these heart disease scare tactics to be a little hollow. As I look back at my relatives who have died, in most cases, those who died of heart problems got the better deal.
I hope to live to a ripe old age, but when the time comes, I’d rather die of a sudden heart attack than fade slowly from cancer or Alzheimer’s.
I’ve basically given up on these “studies”, but you need to give them a break:
Weight is not external, it’s related to something they have been trying to measure. That’s what I’d call Anti-controlling.
Weight is not independent of age, so you would control for the same influence twice.
Anti-controlling is even worse than noncontrolling, because you can actually reverse the causality. It works like this:
You “control” for basically what you are trying to measure and the remainder are dreck effects.
Case in point, you “study” LC and anticontrol for weight and blood sugar (and if that doesn’t suffice, for a lot of other parameters too). You will negate all the benificial effects of LC and the remainder will be the freak cases where you have something like kidneys at 5 % or familial young-artery-clogging which are made worse by LC.
Same thing, indirectly, if you make people sign up for study and throw them out if they have diabetes, which could be helped by LC.
This is not fantasy, I think I have seen this in at least one “study”, I think it was vegetarians too (nurses?) and they threw out diabetes cases at the start – but I don’t remember well.
It’s pretty surprising that the non-vegetarian diabetes rate is so high. That either means selection bias on overdrive or meat causes diabetes. (I think total mortality was low enough not to eliminate heart-disease-in-the-making.)
Apart from total mortality I’d really like to see figures for those who refused dairy and eggs, too.
There is a new trend about vegans. They offer you to watch long and annoying videos. Some of vegan-wackos made insane amount of videos which are impossible to watch and especially to listen, fortunately, there is a written text, which is still super-annoying to read.
http://www.plantpositive.com/
I realized, it is necessary to stop being polite when it comes to vegan propaganda. Why not to declare, sorry, but my mind is closed to certain things , period.
I don’t watch their videos or read their articles anymore either. It’s always the same old cherry-picked, observational nonsense.
Great, Tom!
One more thing about true vegetarians, they eat a lot of carbohydrate poor vegetables (usually less than 5 % carbohydrates) and amino acid deficient proteins together with a lot of oils (aioli, mayonnaise) which means they are eating LCLPHO (Low Carb, Low Protein, High Oil) diet.
So they get too little of essential amino acids, too much of cancer causing omega-6 containing oils. And on top of that, they get too little minerals and vitamins as the veggies have 1-1 000 times less minerals and vitamins than meat and animal fat.
Cows are having grass for 20 h/day to get enough nutrients. We just have to use a couple of hours per day to prepare our meat that contains all the nutrients the cow so carefully collected for us in exactly the right proportions. We must be thankful to the cow that is doing all the work for us so we can enjoy a lot of leisure time.
I’ve had vegan zealots inform me that gorillas are big and strong and only eat plants. I replied that gorillas spend most of their non-sleeping time foraging and chewing. I’ve got better things to do with my time.
I’ve basically given up on these “studies”, but you need to give them a break:
Weight is not external, it’s related to something they have been trying to measure. That’s what I’d call Anti-controlling.
Weight is not independent of age, so you would control for the same influence twice.
Anti-controlling is even worse than noncontrolling, because you can actually reverse the causality. It works like this:
You “control” for basically what you are trying to measure and the remainder are dreck effects.
Case in point, you “study” LC and anticontrol for weight and blood sugar (and if that doesn’t suffice, for a lot of other parameters too). You will negate all the benificial effects of LC and the remainder will be the freak cases where you have something like kidneys at 5 % or familial young-artery-clogging which are made worse by LC.
Same thing, indirectly, if you make people sign up for study and throw them out if they have diabetes, which could be helped by LC.
This is not fantasy, I think I have seen this in at least one “study”, I think it was vegetarians too (nurses?) and they threw out diabetes cases at the start – but I don’t remember well.
It’s pretty surprising that the non-vegetarian diabetes rate is so high. That either means selection bias on overdrive or meat causes diabetes. (I think total mortality was low enough not to eliminate heart-disease-in-the-making.)
Apart from total mortality I’d really like to see figures for those who refused dairy and eggs, too.
Great, Tom!
One more thing about true vegetarians, they eat a lot of carbohydrate poor vegetables (usually less than 5 % carbohydrates) and amino acid deficient proteins together with a lot of oils (aioli, mayonnaise) which means they are eating LCLPHO (Low Carb, Low Protein, High Oil) diet.
So they get too little of essential amino acids, too much of cancer causing omega-6 containing oils. And on top of that, they get too little minerals and vitamins as the veggies have 1-1 000 times less minerals and vitamins than meat and animal fat.
Cows are having grass for 20 h/day to get enough nutrients. We just have to use a couple of hours per day to prepare our meat that contains all the nutrients the cow so carefully collected for us in exactly the right proportions. We must be thankful to the cow that is doing all the work for us so we can enjoy a lot of leisure time.
I’ve had vegan zealots inform me that gorillas are big and strong and only eat plants. I replied that gorillas spend most of their non-sleeping time foraging and chewing. I’ve got better things to do with my time.
I saw someone “reporting” on this study 🙁
It went something like “Study finds MEAT KILLS. This should make people vegetarian! There’s a huge opportunity for faux meat vendors, a market worth X billion pounds annually in the UK. Lots of people buy faux meat! Once again, veggies are healthy, skip the real meat.”
I might not have noticed except I’ve read your whole blog, including the part about spotting bias. So, double thanks.
Thanks for reading.
Fun Fact: Morningstar Farms Vegeterian “Chick’n” nuggets have 59 ingredients. Chicken McNuggets have like 20-25 ingredients.
I saw someone “reporting” on this study 🙁
It went something like “Study finds MEAT KILLS. This should make people vegetarian! There’s a huge opportunity for faux meat vendors, a market worth X billion pounds annually in the UK. Lots of people buy faux meat! Once again, veggies are healthy, skip the real meat.”
I might not have noticed except I’ve read your whole blog, including the part about spotting bias. So, double thanks.
Thanks for reading.
I feel like I should begin a catalog of bogus studies like this and include the names of both the participating researchers and the journalists who delivered the articles/TV segments in the media. After 20 or 30 years, when the public has finally managed to wake up on these issues (I hate to be pessimistic, but I think it will take at least that long), we can all point and laugh and bestow on those people their due disgrace for promulgating so much flagrant misinformation for so many years.
I enjoy mocking “studies” like this one, but I get pissed off simultaneously, because I know that they are only reinforcing incorrect information in the majority of people who read them. Most people don’t know what we know, and they don’t have a clue about how science works–so they stand no chance of penetrating the poor science and sloppy reporting and discovering just how rampant the b.s. runs. Now it’s gotten to the point where most people think the issues are already understood and the answers already known–but only because this nonsense has been shoved in their faces time and again, not because anyone’s made a compelling case.
A friend of mine over Christmas thought he would show off his sharp intelligence on this issue by ripping off the British PSA, saying “I don’t like to put anything in my body that is solid at room temperature, because it will sit that way in my arteries.” I decided to have a little fun and paraphrased your line from your science speeches on YouTube, saying “Okay, but your arteries are about 25 degrees warmer than room temperature, aren’t they?” He gave me a look of slight confusion for about 0.75 seconds and then continued babbling, as if he had never heard me in the first place.
I thought about pursuing the point further, but I know what the result would have been. He would have changed the subject, while internally thinking “What kind of extremist fools is Bret listening to? Everybody knows animal fat is unhealthy…”
This friend has gained quite a few pounds since high school, and he thinks it’s because he is less active now than he used to be with no matching decrease in calorie consumption. It’s frustrating, because he’s remarked on how much thinner I am than before, and I have mentioned how I got here, but it’s like it doesn’t even register in his brain. He’s already got his mind made up. And there are so many other people who are exactly the same way. Sometimes I feel inclined to force the issue, but I know that would bring me down to the same level as the vegan evangelists you mentioned last post. I’ll respect his right to choose his own way over trying to set him straight. But still, I hate to watch him (and so many others) continue to get fatter and less healthy without knowing why.
Fun Fact: Morningstar Farms Vegeterian “Chick’n” nuggets have 59 ingredients. Chicken McNuggets have like 20-25 ingredients.
I feel like I should begin a catalog of bogus studies like this and include the names of both the participating researchers and the journalists who delivered the articles/TV segments in the media. After 20 or 30 years, when the public has finally managed to wake up on these issues (I hate to be pessimistic, but I think it will take at least that long), we can all point and laugh and bestow on those people their due disgrace for promulgating so much flagrant misinformation for so many years.
I enjoy mocking “studies” like this one, but I get pissed off simultaneously, because I know that they are only reinforcing incorrect information in the majority of people who read them. Most people don’t know what we know, and they don’t have a clue about how science works–so they stand no chance of penetrating the poor science and sloppy reporting and discovering just how rampant the b.s. runs. Now it’s gotten to the point where most people think the issues are already understood and the answers already known–but only because this nonsense has been shoved in their faces time and again, not because anyone’s made a compelling case.
A friend of mine over Christmas thought he would show off his sharp intelligence on this issue by ripping off the British PSA, saying “I don’t like to put anything in my body that is solid at room temperature, because it will sit that way in my arteries.” I decided to have a little fun and paraphrased your line from your science speeches on YouTube, saying “Okay, but your arteries are about 25 degrees warmer than room temperature, aren’t they?” He gave me a look of slight confusion for about 0.75 seconds and then continued babbling, as if he had never heard me in the first place.
I thought about pursuing the point further, but I know what the result would have been. He would have changed the subject, while internally thinking “What kind of extremist fools is Bret listening to? Everybody knows animal fat is unhealthy…”
This friend has gained quite a few pounds since high school, and he thinks it’s because he is less active now than he used to be with no matching decrease in calorie consumption. It’s frustrating, because he’s remarked on how much thinner I am than before, and I have mentioned how I got here, but it’s like it doesn’t even register in his brain. He’s already got his mind made up. And there are so many other people who are exactly the same way. Sometimes I feel inclined to force the issue, but I know that would bring me down to the same level as the vegan evangelists you mentioned last post. I’ll respect his right to choose his own way over trying to set him straight. But still, I hate to watch him (and so many others) continue to get fatter and less healthy without knowing why.
I think that there is an issue here that might make things simpler and for which all the points above apply.
Relative risk by itself doesn’t mean anything. You have to know the absolute risk. My favorite example is still that I can give you a strategy that will improve your chances of winning a game of chance by 50 %. Would that change your likelihood of playing. (The game is the lottery: strategy: buy two tickets instead of one). I had actually brought this out in the last “meat kills” study http://wp.me/p16vK0-cM which was most telling because Harvard actually came out and admitted that their report of relative risk was too scary.
This is in popular statistics books: you need to see absolute reduction in risk, or another better indicator, number needed to treat. This paper says “Vegetarians had a 32% lower risk …of IHD than did non-vegetarians.” But, you have to ask what was the risk to begin with? Well, you can actually calculate a rough number because they tell you how many people developed IHD and most of us would just divide the cases by the number in each group. If you do that, risk for vegetarians is about 2 % and for non-vegetarians is bout 3 %.
But, they do a more sophisticated analysis because there is a time factor. But, as Tom points out, they actually tell you the absolute risk:
“On the basis of the absolute rates of hospitalization or death from IHD, the cumulative probability of IHD between ages 50 and 70 y was 6.8% for non-vegetarians compared with 4.6% for vegetarians.”
What? Absolute difference of 2.2 % Would anybody give up kielbasa for those odds? Once you have odds like that, all the points raised above kick in.
Number needed to treat = 1/absolute risk ~ 50. So, fifty people would have to become vegetarians to keep one person from having IHD. Given all the other crap that flesh is heir to could this possibly mean anything?
It’s very meaningful. It means the researchers desperately want to convict meat for crimes it didn’t commit.
Thank heavens we have Dave Evans Healthy Diets and Science blogsite:
http://healthydietsandscience.blogspot.com/
If you ever need to counter anyone who says anything about meat and fat being unhealthy, just direct them here.
Yup, that’s why he’s listed on the blogroll.
I think that there is an issue here that might make things simpler and for which all the points above apply.
Relative risk by itself doesn’t mean anything. You have to know the absolute risk. My favorite example is still that I can give you a strategy that will improve your chances of winning a game of chance by 50 %. Would that change your likelihood of playing. (The game is the lottery: strategy: buy two tickets instead of one). I had actually brought this out in the last “meat kills” study http://wp.me/p16vK0-cM which was most telling because Harvard actually came out and admitted that their report of relative risk was too scary.
This is in popular statistics books: you need to see absolute reduction in risk, or another better indicator, number needed to treat. This paper says “Vegetarians had a 32% lower risk …of IHD than did non-vegetarians.” But, you have to ask what was the risk to begin with? Well, you can actually calculate a rough number because they tell you how many people developed IHD and most of us would just divide the cases by the number in each group. If you do that, risk for vegetarians is about 2 % and for non-vegetarians is bout 3 %.
But, they do a more sophisticated analysis because there is a time factor. But, as Tom points out, they actually tell you the absolute risk:
“On the basis of the absolute rates of hospitalization or death from IHD, the cumulative probability of IHD between ages 50 and 70 y was 6.8% for non-vegetarians compared with 4.6% for vegetarians.”
What? Absolute difference of 2.2 % Would anybody give up kielbasa for those odds? Once you have odds like that, all the points raised above kick in.
Number needed to treat = 1/absolute risk ~ 50. So, fifty people would have to become vegetarians to keep one person from having IHD. Given all the other crap that flesh is heir to could this possibly mean anything?
It’s very meaningful. It means the researchers desperately want to convict meat for crimes it didn’t commit.
Thank heavens we have Dave Evans Healthy Diets and Science blogsite:
http://healthydietsandscience.blogspot.com/
If you ever need to counter anyone who says anything about meat and fat being unhealthy, just direct them here.
Yup, that’s why he’s listed on the blogroll.
If your calculations and assumptions are correct then, based on your figures, that would mean that the vegetarians in the study had double the measured heart disease risk of the meateaters. This would be gold to the meat industry, contradicting all prior studies, and would be used for their marketing. Have you spoken to them?
The only query is your central assumption, upon which all your conclusions depend, that the 32% lower heart disease risk for the vegetarians has not been age adjusted. The researchers unambiguously state that it has been adjusted. See:
http://www.bdlive.co.za/life/health/2013/02/03/vegetarians-may-have-lower-risk-of-heart-disease
Could you be wrong?
In his critiques of observational studies, Dr. John Ioannidis has pointed out many cases of statistical manipulation, no doubt many by researchers who made unambiguous statements about their adjustments.
The slight difference I quoted — 4.6% of vegetarians having some kind of heart-related diagnosis vs. 6.8% of the meat-eaters — was for the raw, unadjusted data. Given that heart-disease deaths more than double as people move into the age bracket that the average meat-eater was in, adjusting that small difference for age shouldn’t leave much of anything.
Hi Tom
Fantastic article. Now this is science, with measurements, stats and suchlike. And look how easy it is to manipulate the truth. So how much easier it is to manipulate the truth in economics and politics. No wonder Obama got elected for a second term.
In classical Greece and Europe in the middle ages, the study of rethoric and logic were considered a vital part of education, so that the educated person could not be decieved so easily. Perhaps if Greece and the rest of Europe still had such an education they would not be in the mess they are in today. Is there a message here somewhere?
Martin
Education helps, but there’s a difference in how people think. For some, it works like this: if it’s true, I’ll believe it. For others, it’s case of: if I believe it, it’s true. I posted a 21-part debate with my leftist pal Paul on my other blog. Despite me showing him the clear, simple, undeniable math of the situation, he still believes we can keep spending at our current level without going belly-up if we just raises taxes on “rich people” — whatever that means. He wants to believe it, so it must be true.
So you cannot see any possibility then, from your distant viewing and assumptions about the data, that you could be simply wrong?
As a remote possibility? Sure. But considering that the same researchers have reported in other studies of the same dataset that vegetarians and meat-eaters have the same mortality rate, that seems unlikely, wouldn’t you say? If the meat-eaters truly have significantly higher rates of heart disease — the number one killer in modern societies — then their mortality rate ought to be significantly higher as well. If not, then something else is killing the vegetarians at a similar age.
I’m still struggling how to use my “Science for Smart People.” I’m just not good at reading these studies, I’m trying to find good primers on how, but I still feel like I’m confused or don’t understand a lot.
Perhaps some books would help?
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Science-Quacks-Pharma-Flacks/dp/0865479186/ref=pd_sim_b_5
http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360172078&sr=1-1&keywords=lie+with+statistics
http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/dp/0062731025/ref=pd_sim_b_2
I’m still struggling how to use my “Science for Smart People.” I’m just not good at reading these studies, I’m trying to find good primers on how, but I still feel like I’m confused or don’t understand a lot.
Perhaps some books would help?
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Science-Quacks-Pharma-Flacks/dp/0865479186/ref=pd_sim_b_5
http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360172078&sr=1-1&keywords=lie+with+statistics
http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/dp/0062731025/ref=pd_sim_b_2