Big Breakfast Bunkum
Last week a host of reports about a study showing that eating a big breakfast brings about a much greater weight loss than eating a smaller breakfast saturated the media. Predictably, the press was all over this report with varying flavors or reporting depending upon the reporters biases. Some, obviously carb biased, reported from a high-carb perspective; others - more well-balanced, no doubt - reported from that bias. Others simply focused on the ‘big.’ Let’s see what’s going on here.
The first thing one must realize is that this is not a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, this is a poster presentation at a medical meeting, in this case the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society held in San Francisco last week. A while back I wrote at length on the difference between this type of presentation and a paper that has gone through the peer-review process. Poster presentations such as this one go through a sort of peer review process when they are presented in the sense that attendees ask questions and point out weaknesses. But the public never sees this. The public sees the press reports about these presentations without the peer review. Papers that are published run through the peer-review gauntlet before they see the light of day and are ever reported on.
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