Discerning Fact from Fiction

Not an hour goes by without a new headline. Sometimes, it only takes minutes for a fresh story to blaze across a website, begging to be read. Yet, despite the boldness or catchiness of a headline, people often ignore the news around them. Perhaps this disregard stems from simple laziness or apathy, but there is another feasible cause: the overwhelming amount of emerging stories. Remaining updated takes time and effort, entities found in short supply in too many American households.

When it comes to science, staying updated takes on a different importance. Some emerging stories hold the key to our health or education, while others contain a knot of ill-supported rubbish. Reading science magazines or newspaper articles is not enough: distinguishing between reliable and untrustworthy information becomes a second duty, one equally important to the first. Such a skill takes experience and practice, but there are several tricks to spotting a poorly supported article.

An article from early February features a perfect example. The three page story, titled Mediterranean Diet Aids the Aging Brain, explores a study’s “promising” results: the Mediterranean diet prevents cognitive impairment. Evidence? 1,400 people completed a food frequency questionnaire, detailing what they had eaten in the past year. Researchers then evaluated the subjects’ cognitive functioning. Those who adhered “a lot” to the diet had 28 percent lower risk of developing mild cognitive impairment. A leader of the study, Alice Lichtenstein, admits that the specific diet may not cause such results: those who follow the plan may have other healthy habits that decreased their risk for cognitive decline (businessweek.com).

Another science article made its debut the same day. This second story, titled Regimens: Multivitamins Not Found to Reduce Risks, shoots down a widespread belief: vitamins do not help prevent cardiovascular disease or cancer in postmenopausal women. Evidence? Researchers examined data from 68, 132 women in a clinical trial and 93,676 women in an observational study. They followed the women for eight years and controlled for age, physical activity, family history, and many other factors, and eventually found that the supplements had no effect on the risk for breast cancer, colorectal cancer, endometrial cancer, lung cancer ovarian cancer, heart attack, stroke, blood clots, or mortality (nytimes.com).

These science articles share few similarities beyond their matching publication dates. Bold differences in research render the first article undependable and the second reliable. Evidence? The study of the Mediterranean Diet had a minimal number of subjects—leaving much room for random results—while the multivitamin discovery involved a huge amount of participants. The Diet study used self-questionnaires, a flawed and imprecise way of gathering data. On the other hand, the multivitamin research entailed eight years of careful observation, evading error caused by a subject’s faulty memory or indifference.

These distinctions involve more than just discerning information: judging the reliability of a science article affects education and health, communication and lifestyle. A woman who reads Regimens: Multivitamins Not Found to Reduce Risks may stop wasting money on dietary supplements, now that she understands their ineffectiveness. A man knows he does not need to jump on the Mediterranean Diet bandwagon, just because a small study declares the diet’s power. But most of all, discerning fact from fiction requires one skill above all: reading. Science changes with every passing hour, requiring attention and effort from a reader. New data means new knowledge, and the more we read, the more we understand article reliability—a tool that betters our choices and lifestyles.