The problem with journalists?
Q: Did you see that journalists drink too much, are bad at managing emotions, and operate at a lower level than average, according to a new study?
A: That sounds a bit exaggerated
Q: It’s the headline “Journalists drink too much, are bad at managing emotions, and operate at a lower level than average, according to a new study”
A: What I said
Q: But “The results showed that journalists’ brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.”
A: How did they measure brain dehydration?
Q: Don’t I get to ask the leading questions?
A:
Q: How did they measure brain dehydration?
A: They didn’t. It just means they drank less than 8 glasses of water per day, per the usual recommendations
Q: Aren’t those recommendations basically an urban mythl?
Q: How much caffeine was ‘too much’?
A: More than two cups of coffee per day
Q: Does that cause brain dehydration
A: No, not really
Q: What is the daily recommended limit for coffee anyway?
A: There really isn’t one. The European Food Safety Authority looked at this in 2015, and they said basically that four cups a day seemed pretty safe but they didn’t have a basis for giving an upper limit.
Q: There’s a limit for alcohol, though?
A: Yes, “To keep health risks from alcohol to a low level, the UK Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) advise it is safest not to drink more than 14 units a week on a regular basis.” And the journalists drank slightly more than that on average.
Q: What’s the average for non-journalists?
A: Hard to tell, but the proportion drinking more than 14 units/week is about 1 in 3 for men and about 1 in 6 for women in the UK.
Q: So, a bit higher than average but not much higher. How about these brain things. How big were the differences?
A: The report doesn’t say — it doesn’t give data, just conclusions
Q: How much evidence is there that they are even real, not just chance?
A: The report doesn’t say, though the Business Insider story says “it is not yet peer reviewed, and the sample size is small, so the results should not be taken necessarily as fact.
Q: When will it be peer-reviewed?
A: Well, the story is from 2017 and there’s nothing on PubMed yet, so I’m not holding my breath.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »