REAL LIFE NEWS: HOW I DIDN’T TELL YOU CHOCOLATE WOULD HELP YOU LOSE WEIGHT
by Hazed
I’m usually all over those stories that tell you how a study has proved that coffee/alcohol/exercise/chocolate is either good or bad for you, will help you live longer, increase your risk of dying, improve your health, make you lose weight or shorten your lifespan.
Yet somehow I missed a story last Autumn about how chocolate can help you lose weight, which was on the front page of many newspapers. It’s the kind of thing I would have headlined “see, I told you chocolate was good for you!” and I’d have written a slightly tongue-in-cheek report of the study, and maybe if I was paying attention I would have been sceptical about how reliable a study it was.
It turns out that it’s just as well I didn’t write about it – because it was a deliberate hoax.
The scam was perpetrated by a science journalist in collaboration with a German TV company, who wanted to make a show that demonstrated just how easy it is to get bogus science reports into the newspapers. They were surprised by their success.
Their report on how chocolate could help you lose weight wasn’t a complete fabrication. It was based on some real research they conducted, in which they recruited people for a diet study and split them into groups: one was told to eat normally, one to diet, and the third to diet plus eat some dark chocolate every day.
The bogosity came with how they manipulated the results to show significant differences in the outcomes. Essential what they did was to measure a whole load of different things, including weight loss and sleep patterns. Some of those things went up, some went down, and some showed no change at all. But they just cherry-picked the values that showed improvement and reported on them, ignoring the others.
That’s tantamount to firing an arrow at the side of a large barn, then drawing a target around the spot where it hit – and claiming you got the bulls eye!
Exactly what they did is explained at the source link below and it makes fascinating reading.
Then they submitted the paper to one of the many fake journals out there, that will publish any old rubbish so long as you pay them, with no peer review. Once it was published, they employed a PR person to craft a press release that made the results look sexy, without going into any of the tricky detail that might have thrown doubt on the result, and sent it out to the media.
The result was spectacular. Many large international papers wrote about this amazing study, simply regurgitating the press release without doing any checking. So readers of such papers as the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post, the Irish Examiner and Cosmopolitan, and viewers of a TV news show in Texas and a morning talk show in Australia were told that they could lose weight by eating chocolate every day.
This is a fascinating insight into just how unreliable the big health stories you read can be. Go read it, and then remember it when you read such articles in the future – and be sceptical.
Source: http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800
