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RESEARCH: Ditte Johansen, Karina Friis, Erik Skovenborg, and Morten Grønbæk Food buying habits of people who buy wine or beer: cross sectional study BMJ 2006; 332: 519-522 [Abstract] [Full text]

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Bleedin' obvious

Alec Wilson   (4 March 2006)

Are wine and beer food patterns mutually exclusive

Alexander M Ponizovsky   (5 March 2006)

power vs accuracy?

Sigrid A Gibson   (6 March 2006)

Bleedin' obvious 4 March 2006
Alec Wilson, Doctor and wine connoisseur Melbourne Send response to journal: Re: Bleedin' obvious	So, it took a scientific study to show us that the beer swilling plebs also buy and eat crap!!! What a waste of money. Any fool who has followed one of the geat unwashed down the checkout aisle could have told you that. In fact, the more I think of it, this article was just a piece of class snobbery dressed up as research and as deserving of condemnation as this rapid response! Competing interests: None declared
Are wine and beer food patterns mutually exclusive 5 March 2006
Alexander M Ponizovsky, Scientific Adviser Mental Health Services, Ministry of Health, 2 Ben Tabai st. , Jerusalem, 93591, Israel Send response to journal: Re: Are wine and beer food patterns mutually exclusive	The findings of this interesting investigation suggest that wine drinking people adhere to a more healthy Mediterranean diet in contrast to beer drinking. The authors found only two different drink-food patterns: one for wine and one for beer. However, the methodology of the study does not allow to test whether those people who bought the wine-food pattern at one point in time were the same as those who bought the beer-food pattern at another. Consequently, to arrive to their conclusion, a subjective inquire about possible changes in the drink-food patterns over time should be added to the cross-sectional method used in the study. Competing interests: None declared
power vs accuracy? 6 March 2006
Sigrid A Gibson, public health nutritionist sig-nurture ltd Send response to journal: Re: power vs accuracy?	Sir, The use of till receipts to capture information on dietary habits is attractive because it is post-hoc, cheap and easy, and sample sizes are impressive. However, as the authors will acknowledge,the quality of data obtained is a compromise between accessibility and accuracy (what people are actually eating and drinking). In particular, we doubt whether food habits can be adequately characterised by purchases of around 20-30 items (on average) bought at the same time as the alcohol. The low proportion who purchased any alcohol at all (~13%) also raises questions about the generalisability of these data to more bucolic nations, such as the UK. Till receipts still have potential in nutritional epidemiology, but it would surely be far better to use data on purchases over a month (via clubcard/loyalty card system), than individual transactions. Competing interests: None declared