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Bought and paid for

Paul Ingraham • Feb 11, 2015 ARCHIVEDMicroblog posts are archived and rarely updated. In contrast, most long-form articles on PainScience.com are updated regularly over the years (see updates page).

But conflicts of interest are always interesting. I recently came across a paper that concluded that slight dehydration has important effects on mood and cognition (Armstrong). I was taking it seriously for a few minutes until I discovered that it was funded in part by a giant corporation that sells bottled water, which made me roll my eyes and get a lot less interested in the results (which were minor anyway, I thought).

So now what to believe? Who knows: the data may be perfectly good, or hopelessly corrupted. We just can’t tell without more information. We’ll simply never know what’s true without more research … which will probably be hard to get anyone but another water bottling company to pay for!