As the Studies Turn...

Compiling material for this feature in the Wedge Newsletter is morphing into something of an obsession. I subscribe to several email features that report on health and nutrition studies. Some take pro or con positions on the studies' conclusions and others merely report them. It's interesting to note how trends develop and who can be counted on to take a critical or supportive stance toward which reports. More interesting, however, is learning how attitudes about a story can be slanted by the headline that gets slapped on the story.

One thing seems certain: the natural food industry and the supplement industry don't hold much sway with media outlets. In April, the headlines screamed "St. John's Wort Fails" when reporting a study which indicated St. John's Wort had not relieved the primary symptoms of major depression. Fair enough, if that was true. All the television reports announced that SJW did not relieve depression.

But upon reading a more extensive story about the study, it turned out that Zoloft, a widely prescribed pharmaceutical, was equally ineffective against the primary symptoms of depression. (Zoloft was effective against secondary symptoms of depression.) We are left to wonder why the headlines didn't declare "St. John's Wort and Zoloft equally ineffective against primary symptoms of major depression." Nowhere was it mentioned that SJW was reported to be equally effective treating major depression as the drug imipramine in a study reported in the British Medical Journal in September 2000, and that SJW had fewer side effects. So what we have now are conflicting studies, which is not uncommon.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe drug companies paid off or threatened media outlets. But I do believe in a subtle kind of collusion based on shared perspectives that makes it hard for mainstream reporters to dig deeply for information.

So what am I saying? That as consumers we need to remember that news stories are not always highly accurate reflections of what scientific studies concluded and individual studies are not conclusive of anything. (Witness the brouhaha over the recent Swedish study that could be interpreted as saying that bread, potatoes and many other staff-of-life foods cause cancer! Even the lead researcher on that study said not to change your diet based on this. What happens in a lab can be interesting, but not necessarily indicative of how things work in our bodies.)

There are dozens of books claiming to have "the latest information" on diet and herbal medicine and many of them are contradictory either with each other or with "the latest information" of five or ten years ago. Think about the way we've twisted our beliefs about fat and carbohydrates in the last 15 years: fat evil - carbs good, fat good - carbs evil, some fat good, some carbs good, some fat evil (buy my book and special formula fat supplement, please). Don't even get me started about protein, please.

There are no magic bullets, no ancient secrets to longevity and perfect health, no cutting edge breakthrough that will save us from sickness and death and no single study that proves anything. Life is complex. You wouldn't glean that from the headlines though.