It happens all to often. I wish I had a dollar for all the times I’ve seen a footnote to a scientific study that says its results may have been skewed because participants often lie about self-reported info…
Sincerely sincere: Even the best computers can’t reliably
distinguish between sincere and guilty faces…
Up to now, there’s been little researchers could do about study participants who may have lied about what they ate, how much exercise or other factors like how many hours sleep they logged. And that just makes a study’s results useless in the long run.
Gotcha!
Alas… Even our best computers, using the latest software, and the most advanced-AI can’t distinguish tell-tale guilty looks (see photo, top of page) from sincere ones when evaluating the veracity of sur–vey participants.
But in answer to this persistent annoyance, researchers reporting their results in the national journal PLOS Medicine say they’ve found a way to catch cheaters and cull their misleading data contributions from the pool.
What they did
Researchers analyzed blood and urine samples from 718 older adults, alongside detailed ‘dietary recalls’, to identify chemical fingerprints, called poly-metabolite scores, linked to UPF intake.
The study found that hundreds of blood and urine metabolites were associated with the percentage of energy someone consumes from UPFs. A poly-metabolite score corresponding with UPF intake could be created using 28 of the blood metabolites or 33 urine metabolites.
This score was predictive of UPF intake among participants using self-reported dietary data. The researchers then validated the scores in a controlled feeding study, confirming the scores could distinguish, within subjects, between high-UPF and no-UPF diets. The scores also significantly between folks on UPF-heavy diets and other who consumed no UPFs.
What they found
Poly-metabolite scores could serve as objective measures of UPF intake in large population studies to complement or reduce reliance on self-reported dietary data. Additionally, these findings could provide novel insight into the role of UPF in human health.”
The takeaway
… Which is great. Because, depending on the circumstances of a given study, participants have always been suspected of lying – a little or a lot – about the types of food they’ve been eating and how much they’ve eaten.
Their reasons vary, and often reflect a range of motives. Some who’ve been lying all along to their personal physician may not want to reveal themselves through a sudden change in their lab results. When confronted about the possibility that they’ve cheated on self-reporting surveys, others have simply claimed ‘vanity’ made them do it. Now, those caught lying by their own blood and urine test results can simply say they’re shocked at how off-kilter their self-observation and reporting could have been! … Trying to ‘save face’ as the ancient Asian saying goes.
My take
Whatever their reason, folks who cheat on self-reporting health surveys – particularly those dealing with eating, exercise habits and related issues – now have an easy ‘out’ when caught. And researchers can rely more on the ‘adjusted’ results of the surveys they use to gather their test data.Which means that, in the end, the surveys being carried out are producing more-accurate results and conclusions, and we’re all getting greater benefit from the researchers’ activities. shot term and long.
Not to mention better value for the taxpayer dollars often used to fund such activities…
~ Maggie J.