Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Fads like microbiome mania wax and wane, but there’s one field of research that consistently generates more hype, inspires more media interest and suffers more from the deficiencies outlined in this book than any other. It is, of course, nutrition. The media has a ravenous appetite for its supposed findings: ‘The Scary New Science That Shows Milk is Bad For You’; ‘Killer Full English: Bacon Ups Cancer Risk’; ‘New Study Finds Eggs Will Break Your Heart’.90 Given the sheer volume of coverage, and the number of conflicting assertions about how we should change our diets, little wonder the public are confused about what they should be eating. After years of exaggerated findings, the public now lacks confidence and is sceptical of the field’s research.91 Nutritional science, like psychology, has been going through its own replication crisis. Some of this may have to do with fraud: for instance, the cardiologist Dipak Das, who published dozens of much-cited papers on the heart-health benefits of resveratrol, a substance abundant in red grape skins (and thus in red wine), was fired by the University of Connecticut in 2012 after he was found to have faked data in nineteen studies.92 Some is likely due to biases: many studies are funded by the food industry.93 Moreover, many researchers adhere to the diets they are themselves investigating, giving them a personal incentive to find evidence of their benefits.94