> Funding [...] The analyses in this study were supported by an investigator-initiated grant from the American Egg Board. [...]
[The Simpsons] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHAFMFFQlkI https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Egg_Council_Guy
There are plenty of examples where that does seem to happen. Not sure if anyone has done a comparison with rate of non-publication by non-interest group funded studies. Probably difficult given there's not much motivation to uncover non-publication without the anti-corporate sensationalism.
And all science these days is sponsored these days, given the shortage of self-funding landed gentry. And there's no guarantee that landed gentry won't be pushing an agenda, either.
Almost everything we have in modern medicine is.
This whole position is nonsense. The paper stands on its own.
Which is not true in this case.
For better and sometimes worse, the process through which medical drugs and procedures come to market, including studies and trials, is heavily regulated.
The Egg Board, however, is free to choose whichever studies to fund they prefer, and will gravitate to ones likely to show the positive effects of eggs and avoid ones likely to show the opposite.
The content of the paper may be entirely legitimate, but it still actually tells us nothing about whether we should eat more eggs or not.
So it's 'science' done wrong. The implications are that most drugs are useless if not outright harmful.
There's two way to bias independent research through funding. The most nefarious is to fund a whole bunch of research, and only publish the favored results. By ignoring enough failed attempts, it's even possible to get false-positive successes, through random chance. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/)
The second way is to only fund research that is likely to be favorable. E.g. if you sell vitamin supplements, you only fund research on people with bad diets, but not people who eat healthy diets that likely aren't affected by supplements.
In this case, it's leaning so far into the latter, that it's just pointing out positive research that someone else found.
From the actual study, which is free to read [0]:
>Dietary intake was assessed at baseline using a validated, self-administered FFQ that included >200 food items
So out of 200 potential associations, eggs were the winner? See this famous xkcd: Green jelly beans linked to acne.[1]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002231662...
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant
Similarly illogical is pointing out the size of the questionnaire - as though the number of questions a person is asked has any impact whether eggs have an effect on Alzheimer’s disease incidence.
We have to take it on faith that they did in fact specifically set out to determine if egg consumption was associated with Alzheimer's disease...
A quick search shows that other studies both do [0] and do not [1] link egg consumption with Alzheimer's disease.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38782209/; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31360988/
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28052883/; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33561122/
