If you have disposable income, you have a moral obligation to give some significant fraction of it to people who have a lot less than you do. The moral imperative here is to make other people better off, not to make yourself feel warm and fuzzy. The corollary to the imperative to give, then, is … Continue reading Fork It Over

Now that I’m thoroughly convinced I’ll be healthier if I get at least seven hours of sleep a night, I want to maximize the quality of that sleep. For this post, I want to find experiments that put common sleep advice to the test. Call it 'Mythbusters: Sleep." I think some people get so obsessed … Continue reading Sleep Part II: How to Sleep Better

After posting about the natural experiment that showed everybody is more productive if everybody sleeps more together, I read the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, a professor at UC Berkeley. It’s an exciting read and I decided to track down the original studies behind the parts of the book about living a longer … Continue reading Sleep Part I: Long-Term Health Benefits of Sleeping 7 Hours per Night

How can we know what food is healthy? Proving any causal relationship in nutrition is nearly impossible. I highly recommend this Freakonomics episode about how unreliable nutrition studies are. It’s not that the people studying nutrition aren’t smart, it’s just impractical to conduct the kinds of experiments we’d need to prove anything. What we need are … Continue reading Potato Chips Are the New Olive Oil

Most observational studies can’t separate correlation from causation, but one of my favorite Freakonomics episodes ever is about an observational study that used time zone boundaries as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of sleep on earnings. First, they note prior research that found a negative correlation between sleep and wages attributed to … Continue reading Always Be Sleeping

In this post, I’ll attempt to calculate the correlation between consuming two alcoholic drinks per day and total mortality based on the recent paper that claimed any level of drinking is unsafe. Their main result was a dose response curve where the “response” was diagnosis with any one of 28 conditions that have been found … Continue reading 2,335 Pages of SI Say Moderate Drinking In America Is Safe

Barely two months after extolling the benefits of sunscreen, I have a sunburn. Do as I say, not as I do. In light of this sunburn, I’ll be interrupting my planned next post on alcohol to look into effective sunburn treatments. Sunburn pain is more thoroughly researched than I expected because it’s used as a … Continue reading Sunburned for Science