A little over a year ago I wrote about how MD and I had been interviewed on camera for a documentary being made to respond to Morgan Spurlock’s popular movie Super Size Me. Tom Naughton, the producer of the anti-Super Size Me film, spent a few hours with us and even contributed to this blog with his answers to the many of the questions my readers had for him. Today I received word from Tom that the film is pretty much finished.

He sent me a few YouTubes of short segments of the movie so that readers could get a taste of what’s coming. I’ll post these over the next couple of days.

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I have a close friend who was an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 13 years, during which time he broke a number of large stories. He left the WSJ to start a company to help businesses deal with the media. He had seen from the inside how businesses had tried to influence him and his colleagues, and he knew the business men were going about it all wrong. For the last 15 years or so he’s helped them get it right.

A couple of times per year my friend puts on seminars for people wanting to learn about how the media work. He invited me to one a few years ago in Las Vegas, and I can tell you, it was an eye-opening experience. The program started with my friend asking the attendees to write a few sentences describing what they thought constituted ‘news.’ Before you read on, stop for a moment and come up with your own definition of news. Have you got it? At this meeting virtually everyone (including yours truly and his lovely wife) came up with something on the order of: ‘News is when something happens of sufficient importance to the readers or viewers of a particular media format in a defined local (could be local – could be national) that it requires reporting.’

My friend gathered the papers and started reading them to the group. One after the other was a variation on the theme above. After he had read a dozen or so, he looked at the crowd and said: “Let me define news for you. News is what the media wants you to know.”

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Today I’ve been inundated with comments, emails and even a phone call or two about the ‘study’ that hit the news this morning allegedly showing that the Atkins diet causes blood vessel damage, and increase in ‘bad’ cholesterol and increased levels of inflammation. I figured I would take this opportunity to describe how this kind of information gets out there and discuss this ‘study’ in particular.

To begin with, this isn’t really a scientific study published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was a brief presentation (about 15 minutes including questions) made at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida a couple of days ago. To better understand where presentations like this one fit in the hierarchy of the scientific world, let’s take a look at how these huge meetings are organized.

The annual Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association is an enormous meeting with thousands and thousands of attendees. This year’s meeting, which is still going on, is being held at the giant convention center in Orlando, Florida. When the organizers of these kinds of meetings start working on putting them together – which they do years in advance – they begin to contact all the big guns for the major lectures. These lectures are presented during the prime times of the conference when nothing else is going on and they can be attended by all attendees. These lectures held in the huge auditorium are usually by well-known, established researchers who present the data from many years of their work on specific inquiries.

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The Letters section of today’s New York Times Book Review carried Gary Taubes’ rebuttal to Gina Kolata’s self-serving review of Good Calories, Bad Calories. I was glad to see Gary strike back the way he did because it saved me some work.

In her review published earlier this month Kolata took Taubes to task for his conclusion that all calories don’t act the same in terms of how easily they make one gain weight. She accused him of ignoring specific studies done 50 years ago that she felt showed decisively that a calorie really is just a calorie irrespective of what it’s made of. Read more »

For those of you who missed it, Gary Taubes wrote the cover story for the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday on the foibles of observational or epidemiological studies. He made all of the points that I have made in past posts about the inability of these studies to prove anything. And he elaborated on how the press misrepresents these studies and makes much more of them than they are worth.

Gary uses the hormone replacement therapy (HRT) fiasco as a case in point of how observational studies are misused. In the 1960s women began using HRT to relieve the many symptoms of menopause. Then in 1985 the authors of the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study released a report that women using HRT had only a third as many heart attacks as women who didn’t. This paper electrified the press, which reported it widely. Doctors began prescribing estrogen to women as a preventative against cardiovascular disease. Almost 20 years later studies began to emerge showing that HRT actually increased the risk for heart disease, blod clots and stroke. Now, many women entering menopause are avoiding using HRT for the one thing for which it is an appropriate treatment: the short term (several years) relief of menopausal symptoms.

Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.

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