• catbum@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Okay, this is fascinating … And makes me wonder how often this–what I will call “academic honorable discharge”–really occurs across institutions, well-known or not.

    I haven’t delved into your sources yet, so this is my somewhat educated guess … Environmentally, this type of social breakdown makes sense with the lack of proper oversight, seasoned leadership, and organization appropriate to the study population. But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study? Like, did kids being dietarily withheld a critical electrolyte affect the speed and intensity with which cracks in the camp structure split open?

    Not trying to be too lighthearted here, but my guess in short: The kids went extra bonkers because of altered body and brain chemistry, with a lack of sodium (assuming the diet was initiated on Day 1) being a key aggressor in… making teen aggression more aggressive?

    • zlatiah@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      “academic honorable discharge”

      I am aware of this happening in multiple cases involving scientific fraud… no idea how exactly this is being done though.

      But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study?

      Not sure… but even without dietary interventions, there are a lot of simple explanations to how this could have gone wrong. This was a much larger study than the Camp Calcium series this PI did, a lot of the recruited kids are low income/from problematic households, with very little to no adult oversight, and there were very few activities for entertainment/enrichment… Also the dorm they lived in was technically separated by gender, but let’s just say that it is not difficult to get to the other gender dorm… So yeah.