Sensational Headlines Lead to Confusion

In the last hundred years, our knowledge of medicine, disease and nutrition science has exploded. Living in the age of information means that we are constantly bombarded with news stories that sometimes seem to contradict the story you read just last month. It can be quite frustrating if you are working to improve your diet and one week carrots are a great snack and the next week they have too much sugar. It's enough to make you throw your hands up and go eat a cookie. Don't blame the messenger here because news channels and publications generally get these stories from a news service. Those who conduct the research summarize the studies and create a press release that is made available to the news service. Many times there is a catchy headline hidden in the researchers' conclusions and this study makes news. For example, a study headline recently stated "Drinking Diet Soda May Lead to Obesity." The researchers had asked a group of people to describe the foods and beverages in their usual diet and then asked them how much they weighed. The overweight people drank more diet soda so the authors of the study concluded that there must be a connection. My common sense tells me that if diet soda is 99% water and has no calories, then drinking diet soda wouldn't make you overweight. Most likely the overweight study group had been advised to cut down on calories to lose weight so they had made the choice to drink diet soda. If you read the fine print at the end of most of these studies, the researchers explain the limitations of the study or they state that further investigation is needed to answer the question. This information is not always included in the news story we see. Another type of research is called a meta-analysis. This type of study looks at a big group of separate but related studies that have already been done. The researchers pull out certain data for each study and then try to draw a conclusion. These studies can be helpful but can also lead to the wrong conclusion since each of the studies used in the meta-analysis was designed differently. One study may have excluded participants if they already had heart disease, while another study excluded smokers or those with high blood pressure. If I were to look at the dietary habits of these participants, I might conclude that eating bananas every week is related to heart disease. In truth, there are many risk factors for heart disease to consider and common sense would tell me it wasn't the bananas. Read past the sensational headline to get the full story before you give up the carrots.