The Bird is Out of the Tree

It’s the Big Show with Marvin and Hector.

And you tell me DP isn’t worthy of an Emmy?

The Truth is Out There

rrgirl, on Bummer:

I could(should?) take a day off to explore all the the links and lines of thought in this post. I will save the link to The Frontal Cortex.
now back to two bricks together, carefully.

Thanks for making the effort. The article in Foreign Policy is pretty demanding, as is the Point-Counterpoint discussion that follows it. The links in Frontal Cortex take you all over the wazzu, too. Worth the read, though.

Really. The juice is worth the squeeze. Trust me.

I don’t know if I’d trust the conclusions made in this news story, mentioned in the Countdown Newsletter of 9 January:

Drinking tea can reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke but only if milk is not added to the brew, German scientists said on Tuesday. Research has shown that tea improves blood flow and the ability of the arteries to relax but researchers at the Charite Hospital at the University of Berlin in Mitte found milk eliminates the protective effect against cardiovascular disease. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16540633/ (sorry. Mom… maybe this study is wrong — cf)

As a tea-drinker I thought this was an interesting finding, so I clicked on the link; The MSNBC source is an article from Reuters. It all sounded convincing. I got about half way through it and then the warning flags and sirens went off.

DANGER, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!
http://www.lostinspacerobot.com/index.html

I searched for the European Heart Journal where the scientific paper is published. Without a subscription I can only access the abstract, but it gives more detail than the Reuters article. Between the Reuters article and the EHJ abstract here are a few questions that came to mind:

N= 16
They used 16 participants in the study. There’s an optimal value for the number of participants or subjects in a research study. Sixteen is not a bad number. It’s better than four. But to be thorough a study has to include an optimal number of subjects to help ensure the statistical relevancy of the results. The optimal number depends on many factors: what you’re studying, what endpoint you’re looking for, the nature of the population, etc. Because the human population is heterogenous — we’re not inbred like lab rats, so every subject is different — a large number of participants is needed.

In my view 16 is good for a preliminary study. I think it’s cheesy for the principal investigator (usually the last author listed in a scientific paper) to make the sweeping claims she does in the Reuters story:

“The beneficial effects of drinking black tea are completely prevented by the addition of milk, said Dr Verena Stangl, a cardiologist at the hospital. “If you want to drink tea to have the beneficial health effects you have to drink it without milk. That is clearly shown by our experiments,” she told Reuters.

Uh. Right. Like, mission accomplished.

The research subject are women
Are the results applicable to men?

The women are healthy
These factors might be noted in the full article, but here are some specifics that should be addressed:

• Age
• Weight
• BMI
• Blood pressure
• Diet: Do they normally drink tea in their daily routine?

Tests on rats
The Reuters article states:

Tests on rats produced similar results. When rodents were exposed to black tea they produced more nitric oxide which promotes dilation of blood vessels. But adding milk blocked the effect.

Yeah, I have this image of rats sitting around the kitchen and sipping tea out of tiny cups.

Extrapolating results from rats to humans is a leap. Not that animal experimentation cannot be helpful. But if you go to the article in EHJ you see this:

“ … similar experiments were performed in isolated rat aortic rings and endothelial cells. …”

They didn’t use rats. They used pieces of rats.

Geez, Louise. Even Toaster knows the difference between rats and rat parts!

There are some other things I could nitpick about, but I think you get my point.

All that being said, I think it’s a really interesting question that deserves further study. That’s a classic Research Paper Tease — say something intriguing, note that it deserves further study, then ask for more funding. Questions beget answers that beget more questions.

Obligatory musical interlude:

So Carey, I wouldn’t tell your Mom that she needs to stop putting milk in her tea. Not yet, anyway. I’m not stopping with milk in my Earl Grey. The Oolong, however, remains milk-free — milk does not go with Chinese tea, at least not in my cup.