The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

Since I’ve been asked about my take on the swine flu situation a few times in the comments section and numerous times by other people I know, I figured I would post on the subject.  Re the above cartoon: I agree with the President.

I don’t think the situation is nearly as bad as many people – including our esteemed Vice President – seem to think it is.  Whenever I hear reports of panic like those we’ve been bombarded with over the past week, I always think of what H.L. Mencken had to say in such circumstances:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

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Photo used under Creative Commons from Mr TGT

A few days ago the Washington Post published an article with what has to be one of the dumbest headlines I’ve ever read. Read more »

Last week a host of reports about a study showing that eating a big breakfast brings about a much greater weight loss than eating a smaller breakfast saturated the media. Predictably, the press was all over this report with varying flavors or reporting depending upon the reporters biases. Some, obviously carb biased, reported from a high-carb perspective; others - more well-balanced, no doubt - reported from that bias. Others simply focused on the ‘big.’ Let’s see what’s going on here.

The first thing one must realize is that this is not a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, this is a poster presentation at a medical meeting, in this case the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society held in San Francisco last week. A while back I wrote at length on the difference between this type of presentation and a paper that has gone through the peer-review process. Poster presentations such as this one go through a sort of peer review process when they are presented in the sense that attendees ask questions and point out weaknesses. But the public never sees this. The public sees the press reports about these presentations without the peer review. Papers that are published run through the peer-review gauntlet before they see the light of day and are ever reported on.

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It should come as no surprise to anyone that the media in general dislike low-carb diets. They use a number of tricks to denigrate carbohydrate-restricted diets at every opportunity. I’m going to start a series of posts showing the different methods used by our friends in the press to downplay the efficacy of the diets that millions of people have found so effective.

One of the most common methods the media uses to disparage low-carb diets is to give any study that makes these diets look bad, no matter how suspect such a study might be, full coverage. We saw this in the mega coverage a few weeks ago of a poster presentation (not even an article in a peer-reviewed journal) allegedly showing that the Atkins diet causes vascular damage. I dissected this ’study’ and the media coverage of it in a previous post. This method isn’t particularly subtle, so we’ll leave it because I want to deal with the sort of crafty, underhanded ways that the media work to bring about their ends.

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