Question: i was reading your profile and on your page you mention about the media stories and radio reports on different things like food or exercise, and when i have heard them it says certain types of yogurts like actimel, help lower your cholestral and you get a healthier body, and in my school classes i'm doing a block of work on 'food matters' and i read an article and it said stuff like milk can help women control their weight, is anything you read ever true?

Wei Xun answered on 10 Jun 2011:

Hi Leahann:

You have found a very important potential weak link in the process of how scientific information is conveyed from the scientists to the public. There are two sides:

1)Is the study itself trustworthy? There is a list of things you can check: did the Study have enough people, is it from a reputable research group (ie a tobacco company can release a study saying that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer,but do you believe them? Be careful though sometimes they can hide by sponsoring other people to do the study), are the people from the study similar enough to you so that what was found is likely be true for you too? In other words, the findings from a study with 20 middle-aged male train drivers from India are very unlikely to apply to someone like yourself.

2)the other side to these news stories is that scientists write articles for other scientist. We’re trained to write technically and concisely in what must seem like a secret, coded language to everyone else, which can be easily misunderstood by journalists and editors. Also the media tends to chose the most sensational headlines, and ignore the sensible ones, so the overall effect is very contradictory.

We have only recently realised that many common diseases can be strongly affected by our lifestyle (diet, exercise, etc), so no one knows for sure what’s definitely good and bad,with a few exceptions. And science has no certainties, don’t trust anyone who say that they are 100% sure!

So if you want to get to the bottom of one of these headlines, read it carefully (find out the name of the study and track down the scientific journal if you can, use this website: http://130.14.29.110/pubmed) and go through your check list. Also do an Internet search to see what evidence there is against it. If everything is satisfactory, then you can believe that it is what we think now, until the next time!

Best of luck with you school work!