NEWSWEEK COVER: Diet Hype How The Media Collides With Science

NEW YORK, March 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Not so long ago patients got all their medical knowledge from doctors. But now a media explosion has transformed that intimate relationship into an orgy of Web sites, cable- and network-TV medical reports, and magazine and newspaper stories heralding one breakthrough after another, report Senior Editor Barbara Kantrowitz and Senior Writer Claudia Kalb in the March 13 Newsweek cover story "Diet Hype" (on newsstands Monday, March 6). To those of us without an M.D., it sometimes seems as if scientists are deliberately trying to mess with our heads-especially when it comes to nutrition research. The Women's Health Initiative study on low-fat diets is the latest in what appears to be a series of dietary flip-flops. All fat was bad; now some fat is good. Nuts were verboten; now, their fats are beneficial. Meanwhile, Americans are getting fatter and fatter. Why all the mixed messages? Three words: too much information.

From 1977 to 2004, the number of newspaper front-page stories on science tripled, from 1 to 3 percent, while foreign-affairs coverage plummeted from 27 to 14 percent, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. In news magazines, the number of pages devoted to health and medical science has quadrupled since 1980. Last year, 10 out of 50 Newsweek cover stories were on such health issues as lung cancer, autism and heart disease. The pharmaceutical industry is wise to this proliferation of outlets and spent $1.3 billion in magazine advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a media-tracking service. And scientists themselves are part of the media machine. "Science is a contact sport," says Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. "People think about it being genteel, but it's a tough game."

Another problem is that headlines can't capture the complexity of research. "Most science isn't a breakthrough," says Dr. Judah Folkman, the famed cancer researcher at Children's Hospital Boston who was involuntarily thrust into the spotlight by a 1998 New York Times story about his research. "It's incremental, brick by brick." Also complicating the issue is the fact that published studies on the same topic can vary enormously in terms of sample size, demographics, data and length. "The media reports all studies as if they have the same degree of certainty," says Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institute of Health. "There's no real label of quality."

From the beginning, the WHI was controversial, report Kantrowitz and Kalb. Scientists especially questioned the diet trial, which enrolled 48,835 women. On average, the participants weighed 170 pounds at the outset and ate 1,700 calories a day. By the end, they reported eating 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day. "They should have lost loads of weight," says psychologist Kelly Brownell, director of Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, who was on a committee to review the WHI. "Yet the women in the test group only lost three or four pounds. The control group actually gained about a pound ... That screams out to me that the dietary records were inaccurate." The diet study was also a victim of its time. Fifteen years after the study's initiation, we know a lot more and understand that some fatty foods, like olive oil and avocados, may actually be beneficial. And some food labeled fat-free is full of calories, which might have accounted for some of the participants' weight issues.

Years ago this debate would have been confined to scientific circles. Medical journals would have filtered new research and doctors would have read the journals, discussed studies with colleagues and then figured out how to translate data into clinical practice. Now even the most respected journals have had to adapt to the growing demand for health information. When the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and The New England Journal of Medicine were launched in the 19th century, they would have had no concept of a "publicity" department. But today, JAMA, which has published several WHI studies, spends $1 million annually on its media and communications program, says Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, the editor.

(Read entire cover story at http://www.newsweek.com/.)

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