Meryl Horn

All right.

Unless it's been turned into a tequila.

All right.

So let's look at maple syrup next.

There's some buzz online about how that one's healthier.

And there is a particular trial that comes up a lot.

And at first glance, it looks like maple syrup is healthier.

Like, you know, when you kind of skim the paper, it...

looked like they saw a difference between people who were eating maple syrup and people who were having table sugar.

Like the maple syrup group had less fat around their bellies.

So I asked Kimber about that study.

So the reason she's unimpressed is that these researchers did dozens and dozens of tests looking for differences in health markers between the group which got the maple syrup and the group that got the normal table sugar.

And out of those dozens of tests, only three showed a difference.

You do that many of any study and some of them will happen to turn up positive, especially when their p-values are like...

0.047 for one of them.

Yeah, and they could have done some work to correct for the fact that they were running so many tests, but you don't see them do that in the paper.

And on top of that, the study was also funded by a maple syrup group in Canada.

Oh, I was going to say, yeah.

I mean, it's basically a group of maple syrup producers.

I did reach out to the authors of the study about these criticisms and didn't hear back.