Shoddy science journalism exposed

It s enough to make us sick to our stomachs all the shoddy food-related public health articles and pseudo-science we see sometimes. And we re not the only ones in Reason.com, Baylen Linnekin, president of a Washington-based issue organization called Keep Food Legal, has a very thorough expose citing articles and naming names. In one example, California was praised by USA Today for perhaps bringing us to the turning point in combating childhood obesity. When Linnekin looked up the facts behind this startling claim, he found an issue brief by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and found that 38.4 percent of the students in three grades were obese, while five years earlier, 38.5 percent were. For those keeping score, Linnekin writes, that's a decrease of 1.1 percent in the obese/overweight levels of a completely different set of students over five years.

The way science has gone down the toilet these days, is really just depressing, says ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross. Unfortunately, most people get their science information from the media, and the state of science journalism has fallen to at least the same extent.

ACSH adviser Dr. Gary R. Acuff, professor of food microbiology and director of the Center for Food Safety in College Station, Texas, says he absolutely agrees with the Reason article.

I attended the APHA [American Public Health Association] annual meeting in San Francisco last week and was appalled at the poorly designed and reported research on food safety, he writes. Presented work (symposia or posters) consistently used outdated or incorrect methodology and, as far as I could detect, never included a food microbiologist as a collaborator. Now why would someone conduct a food microbiology study without including a food microbiologist? Maybe the inclusion of a qualified expert on the project would have prevented the use of inappropriate methodology and might have provided a meaningful and logical interpretation of data. To add insult to injury, many of the studies also attempted to support a left-leaning political agenda. Food safety and politics is always a bad mix. I found the annual meeting to be interesting, but not because of the science presented.