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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A little over a year ago the Journal of the American College of Cardiology published a study that purportedly showed what a terrible health risk saturated fat is. I guess because of all the interest generated by the recent bogus red meat/colon cancer study, some news services decided to recycle this old study and pass it off as new.

Today’s headline in HealthDay is:

Saturated Fat: Even a Little Splurge May Be Too Much

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Just read through the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which was chocked full of good articles. I’ll be kept in blogging fodder for several days just from the contents of this one issue.

The paper I want to discuss today is one that I find hilarious. It’s a report of the Hamburg Burger Trial and I find it hilarious because the results were so different than what the researchers expected. In fact, they mention how surprised they were to get these results. The only reason they should have been surprised is that they are either ignorant or stupid – or both.

If I gave most readers of this blog the same data the authors of the study had, the blog readers would not have been surprised. They would have expected exactly the outcome that resulted. Which makes the readers of this blog a whole lot smarter than the long list of scientists who authored this paper.

Here’s the setup.

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