Calling all you educated types

[andrewducker]

There's an article here looking at bodyfat, Vitamin D and Autism/ADHD and I'm wondering if it's junk science, or it's something I should be paying attention to.

It's already passed my basic "It's not written by a raving madman" filter, but there are people on this list who are much better educated than I about biology.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Comments

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, but the previous poster may have been referring to the bit that was going around a while back about how autism can be caused by absorption of mercury from various products, the prime of which I believe was a vaccine of some sort. If a sunscreen had metals in it, or unusual elements, I could see people believing such a thing, and that might be an easy crap detection method.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Thats only just spread across the Atlantic.

Indeed the MMR "controversy" or "scare" is as peculiarly a British thing as Creationism is mainly an American thing.

I was pretty much referring to the fact that it seemed unlikely that reading more then "sunscreen causes autism" in a an article published on t'internet and not in a peer reviewed journal specifically dealing with Autism and with references that were links to nutritionist woo was highly unlikely not to be bollocks.

I think I've shown more why this is the case below now however.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Indeed the MMR "controversy" or "scare" is as peculiarly a British thing as Creationism is mainly an American thing.

Would that this was true. Over here (in the US) there is no shortage of health nutjobs who now fear all vaccines because they think they cause autism. If you point out that almost all modern vaccines don't contain mercury, most will then assert that the entire process of vaccination itself is bad and causes autism.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Actually one theory is that a "stressful biological event" could concievably bring on the onset of autism (if a genetic prediliction already exists I think) and a vaccine falls into this category. Which was one of the competing theories put forward against the rather random split vaccine idea IIRC.