I’m falling behind in mentioning correct answers, so today I’m giving both a problem and an answer….two in fact.  Pick which one you thought of first.

Apparently the answer’s been a little controversial.

Last week reader panjoomby pointed me to an interesting study that correlated a countries sugar consumption to their rates of major depression.  Apparently that gives a correlation of .948.

Any time there’s a correlation that high, I’m going to get a look on my face that’s an interesting cross between curious and suspicious and that causes me to get wrinkles between my eyebrows.  I decided to take a look around for the full study, and found a copy here.  Basically the authors took data from the Food and Agricultural Organization  and correlated them with the results from a 1996 paper by Weissman et al published in JAMA called Cross-national epidemiology of major depression and bipolar disorder.

I couldn’t find a full free version of the mental health study, but I did find this update by the original author where she described what the study did (they surveyed people in the various countries for symptoms matching those for major depression, DSM III version)

A few things struck me about this study and it’s near-perfect correlation (shown below):

1. Only six countries were used for the correlation.  The original study on depression, they studied 10 countries:  Canada, U.S., Puerto Rico, France, Italy, West Germany (it was 1991), Lebanon, Taiwan, Korea, and New Zealand.   They clarified that Taiwan and Puerto Rico had no sugar consumption data.  Ultimately, their line consisted of Korea, France, Germany, US, Canada and New Zealand.  West Germany and Lebanon were not mentioned.  West Germany I presume something about it not existing any more, but Lebanon concerned me, as it was suggested it had very high rates of depression.  When I pulled my own data from the FAO, it looked like Lebanon’s sugar consumption was similar to Canada’s.  That would have change things a bit.
2. The country anchoring the bottom of the line is dramatically culturally different from the other 5 countries.  When I got my degree, I actually had to take an entire class on culturally sensitive counseling.  In it, we were reminded how many mental health standards were written either by North Americans or Europeans and how they really didn’t fit some cultures very well.  Asian cultures are notorious for under reporting symptoms, and for giving different names to things to avoid stigma.  This was admitted by the authors to be a weakness, but looking at the chart makes you realize this correlation would not be nearly as good if Korea wasn’t in the mix.
3. The only source of sugar they counted was sugar.  The FAO reports honey consumption.  And lots of fruits and date consumption.  I get why you wouldn’t throw fruit in there, but it seems to me that there are a few other sweeteners that might change the numbers.    Any hypothesis that posits that processed cane sugar can cause dramatic mental health issues should probably ponder what (if any) effect a different type of sugar could have, and if adding it in changed anything.  I mean, they mentioned dates in their first paragraph for heaven’s sake.
4. Every country on this list has to have a certain level of infrastructure to consume sugar and to be survey for depression.  Sugar tends to be more abundant in countries that have more food.  Countries that have more food tend to be better for researchers to set up shop in.  Countries without either are not included.  There’s some suggestion that quite a few poor countries might have really high depression rates thanks to malnutrition and otherwise terrible conditions.  That would definitely skew the line, and raise more questions about poverty rates in the originally studied countries.

Douglas Adams would have been 61 today.

As someone who still envisions the words “DON’T PANIC” in large friendly letters every time I get myself in a dicey situation, I thought I’d throw a few of his more memorable quotes out there for you, complete with when I tend to use them in my every day life:

Quote I say (at least in my head) every time I have flown, ever:
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”

Quote I ponder when watching people on public transportation:
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

Quote I think of when I’m lying on the couch and realize I’m thirsty but my water is in the dining room:
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Quote I think of most often when I’m tripping over something or falling down stairs:
“There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.”

Quote I feel best describes my adolescence:
“A learning experience is one of those things that say, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

Feel free to add your own favorite quote in the comments.

Confession time:  back in 2006, I tried online dating for a few months.  It was a stricter site…one where you had to be matched with people before you could see their information, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.  I never actually met up with anyone I met there (met my husband through friends before it got to that point), but I had some interesting revelations before I quit.  For most of the time, my main profile picture was a kind of funky/artsy photo a friend had taken of me from a distance.  I liked the picture quite a bit, so I didn’t think twice about putting it up.  About a week before I quit the site however, someone took a picture of me that was also cute, but it was just of my face.  I decided to put it up as my main picture, not thinking much of it.

I don’t think I checked the site again for a few days, but when I got back to it, I found I’d gotten quite the influx of messages.  Some of them were from guys who had access to my profile for a month.  I had unintentionally stumbled on to a truth of the online dating world: picture type matters.

I was thinking of this when I got forwarded this story from the WSJ best of the web column with the subtitle “The average woman has average looks, the average man is unsightly”.  It’s a take on this 2009 OkCupid blog post that shows that OkCupid users rank women on a normal distribution, and men on a right skewed distribution (the dotted lines show the ranking, the solid lines show how many messages they get):

• Neither article acknowledged the possibility that the average female user of a dating site might actually be more attractive than the average male user.  Repeat after me: this is not a random sample.  This is not a random sample.  This is NOT a random sample.  Everyone who puts up a profile was self selected.  You’d need a study on a random population before you could determine that women were harsher in their ratings.  People sign up for dating sites because they want something more than is available in their daily life.  If a highly attractive 30 year old male and 30 year old female were both considering signing up, the 30 year old female would likely have considerations around the biological clock issue that would push her to sign up faster than the 30 year old male.  Some people still see online dating as stigmatized, so pressure matters.
• Are the women really more attractive, or do they just pick better pictures?  In the story I kicked off with, I mentioned that the picture mattered.  I was (obviously) the same person in both pictures, and they were taken 2 months apart…and yet it seems likely by my response rate that men would have rated my appearance differently in the two photos.  When academic studies look at how we rate attractiveness, they generally control for this by providing uniform head shots.  In the OkCupid post, they show examples of “average” women and men.  The average women appeared to have tried harder with their photos.
• Men might have a more refined rating system. A few months ago I saw a link to a study that suggested that women had a more finely tuned rating system for humor than men.  The link had some sort of comment with it about how it was trying to make men look bad, but I read it differently.  We’re always hearing that women aren’t as funny as men because men use humor to attract a mate.  Thus it would only make sense if women had the better rating system.  It’s being used on them.  Men would not need a well refined rating system…they’re the ones using, not assessing.  Same thing here.  The OkCupid stats showed that men message the most attractive women 11 times more often than the least attractive ones, for women’s messages it’s only 4 to 1.  If ratings matter more to men, they’ll have developed more nuance (ie the 2-4 range will have more meaning).  Anecdotally, my male friends almost always include a rating of whatever girl they’ve most recently met (“she’s a total 9/dimepiece/HB8”).  My female friends seem more binary.  Either he’s attractive enough for them or not.

Do you feel like getting away?  Got your passport handy?  How about those in other states?

Cancer Treatment Centers of America came under some serious fire today for their reporting practices around survival rates of their patients.  For those unfamiliar, CTCA is a for-profit cancer treatment center that advertises heavily on TV about their high survival rates and has multiple locations throughout the US.

A Greek was born on the 260th day of 20 B.C. and died on the 260th day of 60 A.D.  How many years did he live?

“When in doubt, blame the journalist” is one of my favorite explanations for bad science.  So often the science behind the headline is actually good (or at least appropriately admitting of it’s shortcomings) and then a journalist comes along and mucks it all up.  I’ve often wondered how scientists feel about seeing their work so grossly misrepresented, and yesterday I stumbled upon this TED talk where a neuroscientist explains how it felt to see that done to her own work:

http://embed.ted.com/talks/molly_crockett_beware_neuro_bunk.html

It’s a good video, but if you don’t have time for it, here’s the low down:  Molly Crockett and her lab did a study on whether or not taking away tryptophan from the brain would result in worse decision making.  They did this by giving people a gross drink.  The headlines ended up blaring “eat cheese for better decision making”.  Apparently the fact that cheese contains tryptophan was enough for the writers to conclude that eating cheese would cause decision making getting better….something the study never claimed to say.

The rest of her talk is quite good.  Some interesting points:

• People are more likely to believe scientific articles that have pictures of the brain in them
• Most regions of the brain have multiple functions, so any study claiming that the area associated with a specific emotion lit up at stimulus x likely just picked the function of that part of the brain they liked best 
• Oxytocin not only promotes good feelings (like is commonly reported) but also jealousy and bad feelings

For those of you who don’t follow the activities of the Supreme Court, you missed a good one last week.  Shelby County v Holder went up before the judges, and Scalia, Roberts, Sotomayor and Kagan all got in some commentary that made headlines.   The case is a challenge specifically to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states with a history of discriminatory practices in voting must get any changes to their voting practices “precleared” before they can implement them.  

1. Which elections are we counting?  The census data Chief Justice Roberts was citing was from this lower court decision, which clarifies this was from the 2004 election.  I would like to see some more robust data that shows where these numbers go when it’s not a presidential election.
2. What/who else was on the ballot in the individual states in the year the data was pulled.  Some issues just effect certain groups more.  We should really at least attempt to tease out if there was any significant differences in ballot measures/state level races in 2004 before comparing the numbers.
3. Does it matter more who votes, or how much it took to get there? Voter turnout’s a funny thing…sometimes the more hurdles in people’s way, the more dedicated they get.  If two states have identical turnout rates, it wouldn’t always mean that it was equally easy for people to get to the polls. At no point in any of these decisions did I see an attempt to assess how easy/difficult people felt it was to vote.
4. How many laws have they tried to pass but not been able to? When looking at who votes, it’s important to remember that those votes were cast using the setup of laws actually implemented. Sotomayor mentioned the first day that Shelby County has had 240 laws blocked under Section 2, and as I noted above, Massachusetts has tried to pass laws that did not hold up in court.
5. Can we separate the effect of race from the effect of socioeconomic status? I voted in urban precincts for a number of years.  They can be terrible.  
6. How are other minorities doing? I mean I get why the focus is where it is, but doesn’t it matter how other races are doing to?