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lol thats really funny, and shows how easily the media and general public are willing to buy into anything that makes them feel good about doing something which is bad. People like to justify their actions.
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Watch out not to fall into the same trap twice. What they showed was that some people will believe badly made studies without checking/questioning. So, without careful study, and without understanding a problem people should not split things in "good" and "bad".... You know, it is like in Zero-k with resigning. One stupid says "vote resign" and a whole winning team just quits because people don't bother to check the "big picture".
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Don't dismiss this scientific study! It just need to be perfected: to get all the benefits of this chocolate diet with absolutely none of the negative side-effects, just take chocolate in homeopathetic form.
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I think the media should take scientific studies published in well respected journals for granted provided some time has passed. They shouldn't need to do demanding research in verifying a study's correctness. The scientists should be obligated to do proper studies and reviewers need to be better incentivised to spot errors. Lastly, journals need to publish research that reproduces existing studies so people have a reason to verify that.
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  gajopYou're right, academic peer review is a good check for handling these things, but I disagree that journalists shouldn't need to do their own verification. The specific case in this article was pretty egregious. The "lead clinician" in the study was actually a well known debunker of diet myths, and he listed himself in the study as Johannes Bohannon. His real name is John Bohannon, so even a cursory google search for this doctor or his fictitious "Institute of Diet" would have raised a red flag. No, journalists don't have to run their own meta-analytic studies before writing about published research, but they should definitely google it once or twice first.
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Well, assuming the article was published in a respected journal, the journalist don't need to be that skeptic. Regarding the name of the author and the institution, this is something reviewers are usually discouraged from looking into unless they expect self-plagiarism. Doing that just makes you prejudiced when judging the work and I would prefer more papers I review were double blind (with author names and affiliations at least being omitted). I do agree that it would be preferable if journalist were at least a bit educated in reading scientific papers, and I certainly would much rather read articles of well educated journalists.
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Someone should sue this guy, as a lesson to others, because I don't feel like there was any government or NGOs existed that protect people from fake claims...
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Well, yet another reason to just not care about "popular" newspapers (or TV and other media). Mass media is just that: Quantity over quality. But that's what most people are looking for, so this kind of stuff just works. Why bother checking facts when it's effort for you without any gain. The peer review (or lack thereof) with publishers that claim to be respectable is probably the most worrying about this.
+1 / -0
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Don't dismiss this scientific study! It just need to be perfected: to get all the benefits of this chocolate diet with absolutely none of the negative side-effects, just inject chocolate into your vein.
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Aside from the p-hacking (which may well go unreported even in the full text), aren't the biggest problems with this study (tiny sample, small effect size) the sort of thing that would be seen the moment someone looked at the abstract? You'd think the journalists would have checked that at least. (unless it was also not revealed in the abstract, which is pretty skeevy)
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Media do permanent damage to society the moment a fake claim is published. Society is a complex thing, its hard to undo changes after you realize you've done wrong (an apology or amendment article won't work), and some people do hold on to a wrong assumption very strongly. There's ton of example, from claim that damage a person reputation (like claiming "Megan Fox is a gender changed"), or a claim that destroy national pride like "moon landing is fake". The power of lies is way too strong, as you have seen. IMO is better to have a bit censorship than to allow people made up a facts that could even ruin the world, or bankrupt a wrong company, or profit the wrong person.
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Or just don't trust anything you read and listen.
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I don't understand how this happened. How could there be enough "journalists" to write all these articles who believe you can lose weight by eating more? It flies in the face of basic physics.
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If that was supposed to be a joke, you need to work on the presentation    TheSponge...
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 TheEloIsALie what do you expect from a sponge living alone under the sea?
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TheEloIsALie Why would it be a joke? You cannot lose weight without a caloric defecit. Eating chocolate is not conducive to that.
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quote:
Why would it be a joke? You cannot lose weight without a caloric defecit. Eating chocolate is not conducive to that. |
What if you replace your entire diet with a chocolate diet of a lower calorie count.
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quote:
You cannot lose weight without a caloric defecit |
*Citation needed* Food is more than calories. Your (well, the human) digestive tract is complex, as are the ways and triggers (hormones) for us accumulating body fat. If it was this easy, research wouldn't be so completely inconclusive on the entire thematic. Just for starters, you can eat food with high caloric value that your body can't actually process. I'm no nutrition scientist so I can't tell how common that is. And even then, how can caloric value be converted into body fat directly? As a simple counter-example, there are fatty acids that the body can't synthesize, so you have to actually consume them. If you completely eliminate those from your diet, but still eat food with tons of calories, will you gain weight?
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