The roller coaster ride of uneven quality of the New York Times Well blog was on display again as they posted, “Some Fruits Are Better Than Others.” Excerpt:
Recent studies have found that eating a greater variety, but not a greater quantity, of fruit significantly reduces the risk for Type 2 diabetes. This made researchers wonder whether some fruits might have a stronger effect than others.
Using data from three large health studies, they tracked diet and disease prospectively over a 12-year period in more than 185,000 people, of whom 12,198 developed Type 2 diabetes. The analysis appears online in BMJ.
After controlling for many health and behavioral factors, researchers found that some fruits — strawberries, oranges, peaches, plums and apricots — had no significant effect on the risk for Type 2 diabetes. But eating grapes, apples and grapefruit all significantly reduced the risk. The big winner: blueberries. Eating one to three servings a month decreased the risk by about 11 percent, and having five servings a week reduced it by 26 percent.
Substituting fruit juice for whole fruits significantly increased the risk for disease.
As a journalist-reader of ours pointed out, there was a lot of causal language used inappropriately in this brief story about observational studies. Examples – all highlighted in bold above.
When I read the lines emboldened, all the other text becomes blah, blah, blah in my mind because the story has crossed the line from reporting on statistical associations and entered the world of making cause-and-effect statements.
It’s inaccurate.
We’ve written about it before many times. Examples:
Jane Brody’s One-Sided Take on Sodium. Excerpt of what we wrote: “There has never been a study that’s definitively proven that we can save any lives – let alone a million of them – by reducing our intake of sodium from current levels. All of the figures Brody cites are derived from observational studies that cannot prove cause and effect, or else from clinical trials of blood pressure drugs that assume a similar benefit for sodium restriction (even though the effects on health outcomes may well be different).”
Please, Grey Lady, don’t spill more coffee observational studies on us. Excerpt of what we wrote: “On its blog, at least, if not in print, the New York Times has all the room in the world to explain things like this. Use links if you must. But please, Grey Lady, don’t let your writers contribute to the back-and-forth ping-pong games of “coffee lowers risk coffee heightens risk” stories that seem to endlessly pour forth from the coffee pot of observational studies.”
It wouldn’t hurt if journalists and readers reviewed our primer, “Does the Language Fit the Evidence? Association Versus Causation.”
The words matter. Accuracy matters. I shouldn’t have to tell the New York Times that. But read some of the comments left online by readers of the “Some Fruits Are Better Than Others” piece. Readers are telling the Times to get with it as well. Excerpts of those comments:
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