In 2014, David Allison noticed something wonky with a paper in the journal Childhood Obesity. The article purported to find that children who regularly ate kids’ meals with toys inside — we won’t name them, but an example might rhyme with “shmappy shmeal” — were liable to consume excess calories. But Allison spotted that the researchers had incorrectly analyzed their data, causing them to exaggerate the effects by more than tenfold.
That realization prompted a letter from Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — which, in full disclosure, receives funding from the National Restaurant Association — and his colleagues. Several months later, the journal retracted the paper.
Hurray for science and its much-vaunted self-correcting mechanism, right?
If only.
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