"Professor recommends taking a nap in the middle of the workday" (Yle). The case for an interacting reinforcing loop of biases

Finnish state owned tabloid Yle has interviewed Timo Partosen, a physician who has specialized in psychiatry. Dr. Partosen claims that recurrent naps in the middle of the day will mitigate depression. Dr. Partosen is employed by Finland's Institute for Welfare and Health (THL). In 2022, THL bragged that they had convinced Finns to reduce their consumption of butter and salt. In a similar vein, Mikael Fogelholm has claimed that consumption of meat causes colon cancer. There are several cases. All these claims have been distributed by Finland's legacy media. Here's the catch. All other claims have also been refuted by science. And when I consulted a Large Language Model, the response pointed in the opposite direction to Dr Partosen's claim. At the same time, Finland has been in decline for at least 20 years, maybe longer. And the probable cause seems to be a lot of factoids which are communicated by people who are supposed to represent enlightenment thinking. Dr Partosen's claim is thus just the tip of the iceberg, but part of an interacting reinforcing loop of biases. 10 pages.

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Finnish state owned tabloid Yle has interviewed Timo Partosen, a physician who specializes in psychiatry. He claims that recurrent naps in the middle of the day will mitigate depression.

Link to source.

Why is Dr. Partosen making this claim and how trustworthy is his claim?

Dr. Partosen works at The Institute for Welfare and Health (THL), who in March 2022 wrote the following on their homepage:

“From the outset, the goal was to lower cholesterol and blood pressure through dietary changes, including a reduction in the use of butter and salt.

The backstory. In 1950, Haqvin Malmros (1895 – 1995), a professor of medicin at Lund University, published The Relation of Nutrition to Health: A Statistical Study of the Effect of the War-time on Arteriosclerosis, Cardiosclerosis, Tuberculosis and Diabetes which tested the diet-heart hypothesis. Dr. Malmros concluded that saturated fats raise serum cholesterol, which increases the risk of contracting arteriosclerosis.

1954, an epidemiologist by the name of Ancel Keys (1904 – 2004), reiterated Dr. Malmros claims:

“a major factor in this difference lies in the relationship among dietary fats, serum cholesterol and atherosclerosis” (Elliott, 2014).

In 1958, Dr. Keys launched an international project to further test the diet-heart hypothesis, the Seven Countries Study. One of the countries was Finland (Teicholz, 2023).

An important premise to take into account is language, which explains culture (Reich, 2019). What since 1917 has been called Finland, was prior to 1809 the eastern part, and a grand duchy, of the Swedish kingdom, which was once called Svithjod.

Svithjod was an entrepreneurial trade empire, and when Satakunda applied to become a member, Svithjod expanded eastwards. Svearnas (Sweons) language became the trade language around the Gulf of Botnia and the Baltic sea, that is, the same language which is common to current day Finland and Sweden. The implication: Finland still have some of that entrepreneurial thinking, which is about the “knowledge structures” that people use to make judgments and decisions that involve the evaluation, creation and growth of opportunities (Cacciolatti och Lee, 2015 ; Mitchell et al. 2002; Österberg, 2012). Åbo, meaning 'settlement by the river', was founded on January 23, 1229 as the first trading place/city in the eastern part of the Swedish kingdom. Probably therefore, data was sampled from the areas around Åbo.

But because Uralic tribes lived in the inland of the eastern part of Svithjod/Sweden, and one of these languages became official Finnish in ~1863, and reached break-even in ~1925, data was also sampled from North Karelia in the northeast. Contrary to Sweden's entrepreneurial culture, the Uralic-Finnish culture is marked by tribalism (Pagel, 2019).

And the cultural differences between Åbo and North Karelia was significant; in Åbo, 300 out 10 000 people died of cardiovascular disease. In North Karelia, that number was 995/10 0000, a factor of 3.3 (Teicholz, 2014). And the impact of the newly imposed Uralic language seems to still remain. Here's a list of claims made in Finland, and further down, what studies conducted with scientific rigor say about these claims.

• State owned legacy media Yle has previously allowed Mikael Fogelholm, a Finnish nutritionist, to reiterate the claim that consumption of meat causes colon cancer (2012 – 2025; Yle, 2012; Lamppu och Fredriksson, 2015; Yle, 2021; Virtanen och Hackman, 2023).
  
  
• Åbo underättelser, a Finnish tabloid using Finland's and Sweden's common language, reported about a dissertation at Åbo Akademi, where they claimed that the author had discovered the Gender-equality Paradox (Hjortman, 2025).
  
  
• The University of Helsingfors claimed that psychological researchers had refuted the Gender-equality Paradox (Oksanen, 2024).
  
  
• Vasabladet, another Finnish tabloid using Finland's and Sweden's common language, reported a claim that a Finnish researcher had shown that “Men benefit more from a relationship than women – the differences are visible” (Nyberg, 2024).
  
  
• A similar, slightly more chaotic, statement came from Hufvudstadsbladet, a third Finnish tabloid using Finland's and Sweden's common language (Svartström, 2021).
  
  
• Hufvudstadsbladet has also repeatedly claimed that Finland is in the midst of a climate crisis. Perhaps the most flagrant statement came in 2018, just before Christmas and on the day when Finland's celebrate their independence from Russia, when one of the employees made an epic claim that Finland's climate emissions were greater than China's (Buchert, 2018).

Members of our species are prone to mental fallacies. For example:

• Confirmation bias, the tendency to apply the same theory on all situations, or search for information which fits the conviction (Nickerson, 1998; Wason, 1960, 1966; 1968; Wason och Shapiro, 1971).
  
  
• Natural stupidity – our species propensity to rely on information which are either prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972), available (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973), or just easy to access (Kahneman and Tversky, 1977).
  
  
• Dysrationlia – the inability to think and behave [epistemic and instrumental] rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993, 2011, 2016).
  
  
• Myside bias – a psychological disinclination to abandon a favored hypothesis (Stanovich, West och Toplak, 2013).
  
  
• Continued Influence Effect – Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected (Cacciatore, 2021).

These biases interact in a reinforcing loop.

In order to escape the bias-loop, I propose Rational Entrepreneurial thinking (Österberg, 2021, chapter 3). The model suggests that we use three established theories in concert:

• epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010).
  
  
• numeracy (Brooks och Pui, 2010). Note. Numeracy is the foundation for instrumental and epistemic rational thinking (Stanovich, 2011, 2016).
  
  
• disjunctive reasoning (Stanovich, 2009) in concert.

Here's what facts And figures says about the claims made by Finnish researcher and legacy media:

• HBL's/Buchert's claim that Finland's climate impact is greater than China's, was refuted by the fact that Finland's share of global climate oriented emissions is ~0.1%, whereas China's ditto ~30 % (Österberg, 2018).
  
  
• The claim that women are happier alone, and that men crave for relationships, was refuted by the fact that men are doing fine alone, whereas women crave for family and friends (Dunbar, 2021; Pinker, 2005).
  
  
• The claim that a researcher at Åbo Akademi had discovered the Gender-Equality Paradox, was refuted by (Stoet and Geary, 2018).
  
  
• The claim from the University of Helsingfors, that research-psychologists had refuted the Gender-Equality Paradox, was refuted by the study they referred to (Ilmarinen and Lönnqvist, 2024).
  
  
• Fogelholm's recurrent claim that consumption of meat causes colon cancer was refuted six years ago (and he is aware of it) (Han et al. 2019; Johnston et al. 2019; Zeraatkar et al. 2019).
  
  
• The diet-heart hypothesis put forward by Malmros and Keys was rejected (Howard et al. 2006; Nutrition Coalition; Ramsden et al. 2016).
  
  
• Salt is crucial for heart-health; we need to consume 1.5 - 2.5 teaspoons a day (Menter, 2018; Mente et al. 2021).

If all of the above are false, what's the likelihood that Dr. Partosen's nap-claim is true?

In a first attempt to collect some data, I consulted the Large Language model Chat Gtp with the following question:

“Are there any meta-analyses that show that regular naps help with depression?”

This is the answer:

“Meta-analyses of observational studies often show a positive association between napping and depressive symptoms. A systematic meta-analysis of observational data concluded that daytime sleepiness was often associated with a higher risk of depression.”

This is the source: Lingin et al. (2022).

Ergo, like the other claims, the result from the meta-analysis pointed in the opposite direction to Dr. Partosen's claim.

Why?

Well, Finlands tribalism plays a role, and so does malnutrition. Fundamental knowledge is that mental health is dependent on diet (main effect); we need to consume a plethora of micro-nutrients, tryptophan, choline, as well as Docosahexaenoic and Eicosapentaenoic fats from the same plate on a regular basis (For example, Balehegn et al. 2019; Dobersek et al. 2023; Ede, 2019; Lustig, 2017; Österberg, 2020; Smith, 2019; Ylilauri et al. 2019).

What's the consequences of trading all these factoids to the Finnish people?

Here's a list of 19 points which has been reported by the Finnish government and organizations:

1. Finland is marked by Tribalism (Pagel, 2019).
   
   
2. Women's relation aggressiveness (psychological domestic violence) is the big challenge (Helsingfors Police Department, April, 2022).
   
   
3. School is at rock bottom – Too many Finnish kids fail reading comprehension and numeracy (the foundation for [epistemic and instrumental] rational thinking (Stanovich, 2011, 2016) (The ministry for education and culture, May, 2022). Why? see point 2.
   
   
4. 20% of children and young people born in 1997 or later have mental challenges (Pekkarinen, November 2022).
   
   
5. Between 2007 – 2022: Finland has had a fiscal deficiency (lost money every year); Sweden had a fiscal surplus (earn money every year (Harald, HBL; 2022).
   
   
6. The research at the University of Helsingfors has, and I quote, collapsed (Bäckgren, 2023).
   
   
7. Finland has the highest prevalence of Alzheimer's/dementia in the world: inland has the highest prevalence of Alzheimer's/dementia in the world:

   “The country with the most cases of Alzheimer's Disease is Finland. There are 54.65 cases of Alzheimer's for every 100,000 people in this country. These numbers and statistics put Finland in the extremely high occurrence and high prevalence range for the disease. Interestingly, females are much more likely to have Alzheimer's in Finland than males. For every 100,000 people, Alzheimer's impacts 55.32 females compared to just 52.10 males” (WPR).

8. Finland's rate of Alzheimer's is twice as high as neighboring Sweden:
   
   19.9% of Finns who die, die of dementia, and in particular Alzheimer's disease.
   
   

   

   Prevalence of welfare diseases in Finland.

   
   Among Swedes who die, 9.8% die of Dementia/Alzheimers.
   
   

   

   Prevalence of welfare diseases in Sweden.

   
   
   
   
9. Psychological domestic violence (relational aggressiveness) and lethal violence against small kids has increased (Pekkarinen, November, 2023). Why? see point 2.
   
10. Finland has the highest prevalence of depression within the EU (Estlander, November 2023).
    
    
11. 40% of Finnish schoolchildren are victims of psychological violence in the home (Estlander, November 2023). Psychological domestic violence = relational aggressiveness, which is typically female.
    
    
12. The working climate in Finnish workplaces is poor (Helsinki Times, februari, 2024).
    
    
13. At the Summer Olympics in Paris, Finland took home 0 medals. Sweden: 11 medals (one per million).
    
    
14. 50% of Finnish women and 33% of Finnish men, over 45 years of age, are expected to suffer from a serious brain disease (Finnish Brain Foundation, 2024). They meant Alzheimer's/Dementia.

    “One in two women and one in three men over the age of 45 will develop a serious brain disease during the rest of their lives.
    
    Indirectly, the disease affects even more people – family members, friends and colleagues”.

    
    
    
    
15. Entrepreneurship and innovation thinking are at rock bottom. Why is Sweden doing so much better? (Sitra, December 10, 2024).
    
    
16. Schools have challenges – children are not able to cope with reading comprehension and numeracy (Ministry of Education and Culture, April, 2025). Same as 2022. Why? see point 2.
    
    
17. 73% of Finnish women and 70% of Finnish men are expected to receive a diagnosis of mental/psychiatric illness (University of Helsinki, July, 2025).
    
    
18. Finland's economy is back to 1996 levels (Orpo, July 26, 2025).
    
    
19. On November 25, the Swedish People's Party (Svenska folkpartiet) announced that Finland has ended up on the EU's deficit list, and the down fall started at least 20 years ago (formally a developing country).

Conclusion. Finland is in daire straight, and the probable cause seems to be a lot of factoids which are communicated by people who are supposed to represent enlightenment thinking. Dr Partosen's claim is thus just the tip of the iceberg, but part of an interacting reinforcing loop of biases.

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