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posted by janrinok on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the let-me-give-you-money! dept.

Science journalist John Bohannon, whose former work included exposing the awful quality of science journal peer reviewing, has landed a new coup. With only minor effort, as described in http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800, he tricked a significant part of mainstream media into running stories how chocolate helps with weight loss.

"Slim by Chocolate!" the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine ("Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily," page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study's lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: "The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere."

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I'm a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it's in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That's nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

After a little actual, but mostly nonsensical research operation, he had a paper accepted by a supposedly reputable journal. With the aid of a media seeding agent, the story was placed and then took its course.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:10AM (#190062)

    Daily newspapers have been closing and/or trimming their staffs for the past 15 years in response to the instant availability of free news on the web. The problem is, what is the ultimate source of that news? In some cases it's not as dependable now as it was back then, when we had more professional fact checking.

    Just as with the audio quality of phone calls, what we have today is a lot cheaper, but not as good as what we used to have.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:29AM (#190065)

    But this one goes deeper than mainstream news outlet. The so-called science itself, "nutritional science," is crap.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @12:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @12:29PM (#190083)

      Lots of sciences start out as bullshit. When chemistry first started, it was called "alchemy", and when astronomy started it was called "astrology".

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @12:37PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @12:37PM (#190087)

        Doesn't change the fact that they were/are crap.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:44PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:44PM (#190180)

          The point is that its not unusual for a branch of science to start as crap, until enough real knowledge is harvested from that crap for it to become a real science. A crap foundation does not prevent it from maturing into something real and useful.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:33PM (#190233)

        Lots of sciences start out as bullshit. When chemistry first started, it was called "alchemy", and when astronomy started it was called "astrology".

        Those fields were based on the philosophy of "as above, so below": that everything was correlated with everything else. Today the null hypothesis testing that is so popular only makes sense if you think the opposite: that most things are totally unrelated to each other.

        Both are imperfect philosophies, but if you ask me I think the old one is closer to reality.

    • (Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday May 30 2015, @03:55PM

      by buswolley (848) on Saturday May 30 2015, @03:55PM (#190128)

      They published in fake 'scam' journals. This wasn't reviewed at all.
      To call these fake scam journals scientific journals is a cheap shot that just isn't true. I get offers from these journals in my spam folder all day long.

      --
      subicular junctures