Next Gen News

Research claiming that up to 72% of dietary health claims reported in UK newspapers are based on flimsy evidence is itself unreliable

First though, let me be clear. I am not one of the deniers that Ben refers to in his column. Trying to help improve the quality of science in the media was one of the reasons that I became a journalist after finishing my PhD.

Let me add my tribute to Ben Cooper for undertaking the truly Herculean task of extracting every diet claim from a week's newspapers. Take a bow, sir. And my thanks also to Prof Sanders for sharing with me the list of 37 articles that contain the 111 claims they examined. The study is impossible to evaluate properly without that information – and how those claims were ranked – and it should have appeared as an appendix in the original paper.

That seems to be borne out by the fact that the sample of 37 articles included just two from the Guardian, none from the Observer, none from the Independent, none from the Independent on Sunday, one from the Times and one from the Sunday Times. The Daily Express alone accounts for 31 of the claims (with 16 appearing in a single article).

Take for example the claims that appeared in the two articles from the Guardian (both of which were, incidentally, written by doctors not journalists). In "What's bugging you", Dr Tom Nolan – a medical professional who has worked as a hospital doctor – writes:

The work raises the prospect of powerful new therapies that can target and repair the genetic defects behind a wide range of human diseases that cannot be tackled with modern medicines.