Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1350

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Zdeb C.
Read health news skeptically: Conflicting reports on food and health reflect science's methodical ways, researchers say
CanWest News Service 2003 Jul 21

Full text:

Just because a news story appears announcing that a bioflavinoid in tomatoes causes cancer in rodents doesn’t mean you should give up tomatoes, researchers say. Changes in diet must be done with skepticism.

Green tea is still good for you. Margarine used to be better for you than butter. Now it’s not, for some people anyway. A glass or two of red wine a day is OK, for now. Eggs are back, but for how long? Last week, new research out of the U.S. found that black cohosh, an herbal extract and one of the most widely used alternative therapies for women experiencing menopause symptoms, may not be a safe alternative therapy for women with breast cancer and may be undesirable for women who could have undetected breast tumours.

The lead researcher suggested that women who may be at high risk should proceed with great caution or simply avoid taking black cohosh until further study. She based this conclusion on research involving female mice. If you’re a menopausal woman taking black cohosh, should that be enough evidence to make you stop?

Hardly a day goes by without a headline or news story trumpeting some new study or research finding that something that was good for you last week, six months or a year ago, should now be avoided.

A national American study found 84 per cent of respondents believe there is a strong relationship between the foods they eat and their over-all health, and almost 60 per cent have changed their eating habits because of conflicting new research. When confused about a particular food, people said they consume less of that food or switch to another food as a substitute.

But what are consumers, or doctors for that matter, supposed to make of duelling research? Should we flip with every health/drug/nutrition flip-flop that comes along?

No, says Dr. Brian Rowe, a professor and research director of emergency medicine at the University of Alberta. And a researcher.

In general, claims of drug effectiveness (his area of interest as an asthma researcher) are exaggerated in the media because most trials are small and any side-effects are poorly reported, he says.

“The story comes out and says this is a promising new treatment. But before you invest all your life savings or start taking something like the polypill (a single pill combining six medications that British researchers say could prevent more than 80 per cent of heart attacks and strokes if heart patients, most diabetics and everyone over 55 took it), you should make sure they’ve actually done due diligence and they’ve done the proper high quality trials and research to show that this treatment actually works,” Rowe says.

Rhonda Bell, an associate nutritional science professor and a nutrition and diabetes researcher, thinks the media and the Internet must take some responsibility for the confusion surrounding new research.

Very often what gets reported in a sound bite is but an interesting finding that researchers never intended to be big breaking news.

“It’s almost like playing broken telephone,” Bell explains. “The original message is good, but by the time it goes through several layers of simplification and people wanting to make it relevant, it loses the context of what the study was about.”

Much of what is reported today is also basic research that wouldn’t have been reported before the Internet, she says.

“With the Internet, a newsperson can pick up on what’s happening in basic science. Twenty years ago you’d have to go to the original source. You’d have to go to the library, look up the study and sit in the library for days and days reading. Now that information is available at the drop of a hat.

But what’s important is how you interpret it,” Bell says.

Consumers may think of it as contradictory research, but as a scientist, Bells says the differences found in studies, as well as the common results, are how science continues to move forward. It encourages other researchers in their own studies to either reaffirm or counter earlier findings, which helps to explain them.

Alan Cassels, a health policy researcher at the University of Victoria, says it’s the incremental process of small discoveries. It’s the media that zeroes in, for example, on a certain kind of bioflavinoid in tomatoes that, when tested in rats, cause the development of certain kinds of cancer and cranks it up.

“The headline reads ‘Don’t eat tomatoes, cancer is bad’ but without explaining that these are really tentative conclusions only applicable to rodents and that it will take five more years of study to see if it’s applicable to humans.”

Or maybe the qualifiers are reported but so far down in the story that many readers miss it, says Cassels, who believes he is the first person to have evaluated the way the Canadian media report drug findings.

The fact that people buy in to headlines that suggest eating tomatoes prevents cancer reflects their desire for a non-existent easy fix.

Most people know what you have to eat and the kind of lifestyle you have to live to be healthy, Bell says, but it takes time and willpower and we’re an instant society.

Cassels thinks research studies are good at generating conversations, “but I don’t know whether you should ever drastically alter your behaviour because of them,” Cassels says. “I would emphasize that people need healthy skepticism and they need to know that there are certain factors that put a research story on the front page that day. It doesn’t mean it’s a wonderful, important thing.”

It’s more likely a wonderful, important thing when many studies, involving large numbers of people, corroborate a finding, the U of A’s Rowe says. This is the theory behind an international effort known as the Cochrane Collaboration: Some 6,000 volunteers systematically scan millions of journal articles to find and summarize the most effective and up-to-date treatments for disease, providing patients and physicians with a kind of road map.

“By doing this, you often can find treatments that are clearly beneficial, clearly not beneficial and those in the middle where you say ‘Gee, we need another study,’” says Rowe, a Cochrane researcher.

EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BE A HEALTHY SKEPTIC

- Take a look at what the purpose of the study really was and who’s doing the research. Do they have a vested interest?

- Look at the study with a very objective and critical eye asking what were the methods used, how relative those methods were, were there control groups present, how many people, if any, were involved in the study, was it a multi-centre study or a single centre reporting a finding, has it been reported by other people.

- If you’re really interested in the findings track down the actual study.

- Realize that a single study is just one piece of a puzzle — accept it for what it is.

- Don’t make snap or drastic judgments where food or your health are concerned; don’t flip-flop.

- Search for the broader nutrition message. If a study says avoid red meat, it means reduce your saturated fat. A study that says avoid margarine and switch to butter means reduce your trans fats.

- Ask your doctor for an opinion and advice.