Last year, a study came out showing that beef jerky and other cured meats, could trigger mania in bipolar disorder (paper, popular article). It was a pretty big deal, getting coverage in the national press and affecting the advice psychiatrists (including me) gave their patients.

The study was pretty simple: psychiatrists at a mental hospital in Baltimore asked new patients if they had ever eaten any of a variety of foods. After getting a few hundred responses, they compared answers to controls and