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the kids intensely dislike the vending machine supplier and the prices charged so much that they boycott even though they crave the food inside.

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There has to be substance behind an observation to reach a meaningful conclusion. There also has to be an independent determination of linkage of the phenomena.

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Originally posted by CompGuy:
You're confusing two different things. It's perfectly OK to publish data--that's research too.

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In a remarkable piece of survey research, public health experts at Oxford University went out into schools to get the consumer perspective just as the new nutritional rules were coming into effect. Far from being drones for Big Food, it turns out, the kids were well aware of the differences between healthy and unhealthy diets. However, here’s the problem: Health was not the driving force in deciding what to eat. Instead, lunch breaks were valued as time to socialize with their peers, which meant that vending machine food was the most efficient way of maximizing this social time. You didn’t have to line up — and you weren’t restricted to eating in an ugly canteen (which was another complaint).

Even more astonishing, the kids turned out to be instinctively libertarian: As the study notes, they were “often vociferous in defending their supposed ‘rights’ ” — and “frustrated with the government for imposing ‘unfair’ and ‘harsh’ policies on their freedom.” As one grade-school kid put it to the Oxford researchers, “We decide what we eat. It’s not their [the government’s] choice. It’s our freedom of eating.”

And so it came to pass that kids rebelled against the new government menus by bringing their own food to school; and when the schools tried to regulate that according to the new nutritional guidelines, the kids simply went off campus to buy food from shops and cafes. Predictably, this led some adults to argue that these establishments should be outlawed — to which the British health secretary said, in effect, where does this end?

It certainly doesn’t seem to end in weight loss. “The fruit and veg campaign in the U.K. has been very expensive and had no impact on obesity,” said Professor Thomas Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London. “There is high awareness of the five [servings] a day campaign and it is the overweight and obese who are most likely to report eating five a day!”