You shared a bunk paper and your punishment is this wall of text. I'm sorry :gulag:
This "paper" is published in the journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, which according to its homepage:
Orthomolecular is a term that comes from ortho, which is Greek for "correct" or "right," and "molecule," which is the simplest structure that displays the characteristics of a compound. So it literally means the "right molecule."
Two-time Nobel Prize winner, and molecular biologist, Linus Pauling, Ph.D.,coined the term "Orthomolecular" in his 1968 article "Orthomolecular Psychiatry" in the journal "Science."
It's not a real scientific journal. Linus Pauling was a Nobel Prize winner that later in his life acquired a terminal disease and advocated for giving forehead tattoos to people with genetic defects so people would know not to reproduce with them, and a bunk therapy of ingesting thousands of times the normal amounts of vitamins that claimed to cure everything from a headache to terminal cancer, among other much more benign things.
The publication presents as evidence for its claims three things:
A study in which rats are given a severely restricted diet with less than 0.03% of tryptophan and then are found to be more susceptible to electric shocks. Then for whatever reason this means that they are more violent,
A study in which:
500 mg/day [of tryptophan …] could well be too
low with regard to "psychic balance," since it has
been found that normal subjects consuming twice
the RDA of tryptophan over a one-year period
"improved psychologically," whereas no such
change occurred in another group in which the
intake of tryptophan was not increased'
The citation for this second study is to the same journal. In this study 118 people self-reported their diets and took a personality quiz where you have to choose which of two words is closest to a prompt and it tells you how close you are to a patient in a mental hospital from 1955 (that is, it does not even score for violence). They were told what to eat and what to expect (increased "psychic balance"). A year later they self-reported again and took the same quiz there were already familiar with. There was no control, the group in which the intake of tryptophan was not increased simply did not change their diet.
Data from the United Nations about homicide rate and corn consumption:
those above the median in corn consumption (Md =
1.30 bushels per capita) had significantly higher
mean homicide rates (10.69 per 100,000
population) than countries below the median in
corn consumption (4.31 per 100,000 population),
by t test (t = 2.168, d.f. = 51, p = .0348)
No explanation is given for why did they split at the median and compared the means instead of doing a Pearson correlation test like one would normally do. In fact, searching for the citations of this paper I found this other publication in the same journal that does a Pearson correlation like you're taught to do in your very first very class in statistics or in experimental design, and finds no correlation.
kek, this mfer expects me to believe that TRYPTOPHAN DEFICIENCY makes americans violent
Amerisharts, FAMOUSLY KNOWN for their low animal protein consumption. We just need to eat EVEN MORE MEAT guys, there's an interdimensional rift somewhere in the Atlantic where if you cross it it ups your tryptophan requirements by 5000x
You shared a bunk paper and your punishment is this wall of text. I'm sorry :gulag:
This "paper" is published in the journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, which according to its homepage:
It's not a real scientific journal. Linus Pauling was a Nobel Prize winner that later in his life acquired a terminal disease and advocated for giving forehead tattoos to people with genetic defects so people would know not to reproduce with them, and a bunk therapy of ingesting thousands of times the normal amounts of vitamins that claimed to cure everything from a headache to terminal cancer, among other much more benign things.
The publication presents as evidence for its claims three things:
The citation for this second study is to the same journal. In this study 118 people self-reported their diets and took a personality quiz where you have to choose which of two words is closest to a prompt and it tells you how close you are to a patient in a mental hospital from 1955 (that is, it does not even score for violence). They were told what to eat and what to expect (increased "psychic balance"). A year later they self-reported again and took the same quiz there were already familiar with. There was no control, the group in which the intake of tryptophan was not increased simply did not change their diet.
No explanation is given for why did they split at the median and compared the means instead of doing a Pearson correlation test like one would normally do. In fact, searching for the citations of this paper I found this other publication in the same journal that does a Pearson correlation like you're taught to do in your very first very class in statistics or in experimental design, and finds no correlation.
kek, this mfer expects me to believe that TRYPTOPHAN DEFICIENCY makes americans violent
Amerisharts, FAMOUSLY KNOWN for their low animal protein consumption. We just need to eat EVEN MORE MEAT guys, there's an interdimensional rift somewhere in the Atlantic where if you cross it it ups your tryptophan requirements by 5000x