User:Wikiprojecter

Hi, my background is in science and I'm a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom.

I have a great interest in the relationship between diet and health. It's an area that has proven extremely difficult to research, due to limitless confounding factors, and impossibility of running double-blind trials (at least on humans anyway).

The goal of creating the "wiki-research diet vs health page" which both explains, and is, a wiki-research project, is to draw on the collective knowledge of wikipedia readers, to gain a highly detailed view of global diets, so this can be correlated with health. As the level of detail grows, so do the insights that can be gained, thus benefitting everyone.

If the level of detail grew to cover diet not only as a function of country, but also of sub-country region, decade, age, religion and/or social class (and if health statistics could be gathered reflecting some of these factors) then it might be possible to get a fuller understanding of how diet affects health, than conventional studies have thus far achieved.

In turn, the information gathered in the project becomes freely available to the world via the wonder of wikipedia. This can then be used by other researchers, or health professionals - however be warned that currently the data is still very 'rough' and so conclusions should not be drawn from it. Also note that correlation is not causation, so changing your diet may well not lead to the suggested health change*. It's vital to understand this.

This research topic does not require most participants to be skilled in scientific methods, and this makes it suitable for crowd-sourcing.

Please join in. Add your knowledge of diet to the page. If you are able to, feel free to divide a country into sub-regions.

Thanks for your support.


 * For example, foodstuffs tend to be alternatives, so countries that drink a lot of coffee, tend not to drink tea. Thus if coffee is harmful to health, this will cause tea to appear to be beneficial (it might be - then again it might not).

As a second example, note that coffee is often consumed in rich countries - with the result that it is associated with diseases that are common in rich countries. This means that some other nutrient common in rich countries might be the cause of the ill-health that appears correlated with coffee drinking (e.g. fat).

By contrast, poor countries where coffee is drunk less often, see far more congenital anomalies. As a result coffee consumption is correllated with fewer birth defects. It would be incredibly unwise to imagine that coffee has a protective effect against birth defects.