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

by Stuart Ritchie

I include PREDIMED here not because it was a particularly bad example of hype, but because it’s an example of some of the best research in an extraordinarily hyped field – and because it shows us how even a poster child for rigour might be subject to hidden flaws. Rather like psychology, nutritional epidemiology is hard. An incredibly complex physiological and mental machinery is involved in the way we process food and decide what to eat; observational data are subject to enormous noise and the vagaries of human memory; randomised trials can be tripped up by the complexities of their own administration. Given that context, the sheer amount of media interest in nutritional research is particularly unfortunate. Perhaps the very scientific questions that the public wants to have answered the most – what to eat, how to educate children, how to talk to potential employers, and so on – are the ones where the science is the murkiest, most difficult, and most self-contradictory. All the more reason that scientists in those fields need to take more seriously the task of sensibly communicating their findings to the public.