Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
All shall have pills
SOME time ago Feedback noticed posters plugging nutritional supplements, exhorting us to buy "his" and "her" pills from Vitabiotics, and shrugged. We started from a sceptical stance on the benefits of supplements, especially for the people who buy them – who probably have a more balanced diet than those who don't. We were more sceptical still when it came to separate pills for women's and men's subtly different recommended daily amounts. One effect of the division would seem to be that twice as many pills would lurk untaken in certain bathroom cabinets, increasing sales.
Recently we have spotted the company promoting a plethora of pregnancy-related pills: Pregnacare® Original, Plus and Max; Pregnacare® Breastfeeding; Pregnacare® New Mum; Pregnacare® Conception; Wellman® Conception; and, for that feeling of togetherness, Pregnacare® His & Her Conception. If there's some kind of quantum limit for this kind of subdivided advertising, they must be approaching it. Perhaps the next step will be a super-specific supplement to be taken only during the hour before conception? Or during?
Tesco supermarket's labelling helpfully informed Geoffrey Thomas that what he had bought was "freezer safe": "Indeed," he says of his ice-cube trays, "I hope so"
Keep taking the tablets
SEARCHING for research on the efficacy of vitamin supplements, Feedback noticed that Vitabiotics references the paper "Effect of multiple-micronutrient supplementation on maternal nutrient status, infant birth weight and gestational age at birth in a low-income, multi-ethnic population", published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2010. Out of 353 women featured in this study, only 39 per cent reported having taken the specified pills or placebos. In the jargon, they were "compliant" with the study. Among these women there was a statistically significant (small) effect on the size and weight of their babies.
Correlations between birth size and weight, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies – that "nutrient status" – were weak and patchy. Feedback concludes that just taking the pills, or perhaps just reporting "compliantly", had a stronger effect than what was in them. The authors aren't the first to conclude that "further larger studies are required". We wonder whether it's the psychology of compliance that these studies should look into.
Enthusiasm for exercise
GOOD news for those who don't get around to proper exercise. A blog in The New York Times describes a study concluding that "Over all [sic], the data reveal that 'sex can be considered, at times, a significant exercise'." It adds that researcher Antony Karelis therefore believes that sex is worth encouraging in people who otherwise balk at working out.
Ninety-eight per cent of Karelis's volunteers reported that sex felt more fun than jogging. Feedback notes that the study included 21 couples, so that other 2 per cent was one individual.
Determinism of heart health
FEEDBACK thanks the Journal of Improbable Research for alerting us to new research on nominative determinism – the name given by Feedback reader C. R. Cavonius to the phenomenon of people's names appearing to influence their occupation or publishing history (17 December 1994). The latest finding, published in the BMJ's year-end issue, is that among people in Dublin with the surname Brady, "the unadjusted odds ratio for pacemaker implantation [required due to the condition bradycardia] was 2.27 (95% confidence interval 1.13 to 4.57)." Whether changing one's name is protective, we know not.
Improbable Research also alerts us to the existence of hundreds of articles whose authors include a Wong and a Wright – which it dubs "nominative indeterminism".
Nominatively environmental
THE above leads us to break our many resolutions of abjuration and mention David Green of the Clean Energy Council; Paul Collier, author of Why Coal Production Must End; and Terry Marsh, hydrologist.
Thanks to Luke McGuiness, Robin Hanan and Ian Nelson.
Overcrowding in Australia
LOOKING up their phone number on a free public "reverse phone directory", a reader was a little startled to be informed that "In 2006, there were 14,267 persons usually resident" at their address: "51.7% were males and 48.3% were females. Of the total population... 3.7% were Indigenous persons, compared with 2.3% Indigenous persons in Australia." (Digits have been changed to protect the reader's remaining privacy.)
The reverseaustralia.com service went on to list the marital status and religious affiliation of the population of the reader's address. Feedback wonders how much we would have to pay to find out how many of the alleged population of this one house were registered to vote, for whom, how early and how often.
Things we'd rather not know
FINALLY, software that logs our every online interaction – called the "Big Brother engine" by a practitioner of Feedback's acquaintance – is producing more insights into human behaviour, including grisly ones of which we would rather have remained ignorant. For example, Dave Smith sends a screenshot of amazon.com assuring him that those who bought the textbook Gray's Anatomy also bought a slew of other anatomical texts – and black-handled kitchen scissors.
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