Sweet or not, the end
Almost everyone who grows ancient dies.
In a drastic way, this low sentence could sum up the Dutch-Danish-British study entitled “Sugar intake in coffee and tea and long-term mortality risk in older adult men in Denmark: 32-year follow-up from a prospective cohort study“.
The study states: “A total of 2923 men were included (mean age at inclusion: 63 ± 5 years), of whom 1007 (34.5%) added sugar. During the 32 years of follow-up, 2581 participants (88.3%) died, 1677 in the no-sugar group (87.5%) versus 904 in the sugar group (89.9%).”
Feedback’s clever, pared-down summary is reminiscent of Yoshiro Nakamatsu’s Ig Nobel speech. (Nakamatsu, also known as Dr. NakaMats, won the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he ate over a 34-year period, a work he continues to do in 2024.) Nakamatsu said, “Life should be long. Speeches should be low.”
Shocking news
Mindfulness practice helps us focus on something specific – not just in passing, but in the long run. Feedback can’t support but focus on a 10-year study titled “The Role of Mindfulness-Based Psychological Support During an ECT Course.”
ECT stands for electroconvulsive therapy, and this study was one of the most successful attempts—perhaps the only attempt—to intentionally combine mindfulness with electroconvulsive therapy.
The researchers report that after ECT, their patients “were fully cognitively functional and able to participate in plain mindfulness-based psychotherapy, with no evidence of difficulty remembering novel information.”
They (the researchers), who were then working at the MidCentral District Health Board in Palmerston North, Recent Zealand, came to a conclusion that is polysyllabic.
The authors wrote, “This study confirms the benefits of ultrabrief pulsed electroconvulsive therapy in reducing adverse cognitive outcomes… but also demonstrates that psychological interventions and physical treatments are not mutually exclusive.”
Be careful with the dishes
Just one year later, researchers in the US published a study titled “Washing Dishes to Wash Dishes: A Brief Guide to Informal Mindfulness Practice“. They had the goal in mind. “We hypothesized,” they wrote, “that compared with a control group, participants receiving mindful dishwashing instructions would demonstrate greater state mindfulness, attentional awareness, and positive affect.”
They tested their hypothesis on 51 college students and report that the test was successful. Their study concludes with a bigger-picture assessment, saying, “The implications of these findings are manifold.”
Remembering to be mindful
You can also be mindful of mindfulness. Three researchers (two from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, one from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia) carefully reviewed the extensive body of published research on mindfulness and then published a study on what they thought they saw. Their study, titled “Exploring the Past, Present, and Future of the Mindfulness Field: A Multi-Technical Bibliometric Review“, more or less complains that few people paid attention to these studies.
The team offers an excuse for why so few people have paid attention to mindfulness research: “low citation rates may also simply indicate that the paper is in a narrow field of research. Therefore, they should not be misinterpreted as low-quality evidence.”
Antibiotic resistance
David Gordon adds his non-normative perspective to Feedback’s collection of professional opinions on whether “the art of medicine is to entertain the patient while nature influences the cure.”
“These principles can be applied sensibly to other medical scenarios. Unfortunately, this is bad for business, both for the doctor and for the pharmaceutical companies for which one inevitably acts as an agent. There are fewer ‘return visits’ to deal with drug side effects and unfettered fears. More importantly, in the long run, patients are discouraged from believing that every disease requires a prescription.”
Loss of power
Superpowers – even the petty ones that readers add to the Feedback compendium – aren’t all eternal. Grainne Collins confides: “I had a superpower: I could look at any list or table of numbers and know straight away that there was a mistake. It could take me 10 minutes to work out what it was, but I was always right. Unfortunately, as my dyslexia receded (I can now see the difference between ‘form’ and ‘od’ without learning), my superpower receded too!”
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel ceremony and co-founded the Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual ways to apply computers. His website is unbelievable.com.
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