Bad Science

by Ben Goldacre

For the moment we will focus on ‘nutritionists’, members of a newly invented profession who must create a commercial space to justify their own existence. In order to do this, they must mystify and overcomplicate diet, and foster your dependence upon them. Their profession is based on a set of very simple mistakes in how we interpret scientific literature: they extrapolate wildly from ‘laboratory bench data’ to make claims about humans; they extrapolate from ‘observational data’ to make ‘intervention claims’; they ‘cherry-pick’; and, lastly, they quote published scientific research evidence which seems, as far as one can tell, not to exist.