NHD CLINICAL - DIETARY ADVICE


CAN THE PUBLIC TRUST THE DIETARY ADVICE PROVIDED BY UK NEWSPAPERS?


Newspapers in the UK form an important public source of information on nutrition and health (1), but do they accurately convey dietary advice to readers?


Benjamin EJ Cooper Medical Student King’s College London


William E Lee Researcher Institute of Psychiatry


We recently published a peer-reviewed paper in the scientific journal Public Understanding of Science in which we systematically reviewed the evidence base for dietary health claims made in the 10 top-selling UK national newspapers over a week in 2008. For an article to be investigated, it had to make a dietary health claim about a food or drink which could be interpreted by the reader as advice. For example, ‘Red wine causes breast cancer’ would constitute a claim, however, ‘Oranges contain vitamin C’ would not constitute a claim. The claims that were identi- fied were researched using PubMed and the evidence for the claim was then graded using two prominent grading systems for scientific evidence: the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) grading system (2) and the World Cancer Research Fund’s (WCRF) scale (3).


The UK is typical of many developed countries:


there is high literacy, much of the population’s daily information is obtained via the mass media and obe- sity represents an unprecedented public health emer- gency which is best understood as a dietary problem of the whole population. In this context, it might be expected that dietary advice dispensed by newspapers would reflect the seriousness of the situation, with simple advice to eat appropriate foods in appropri- ate quantities incorporated into articles with good evidence supporting any specific claims. This sadly is not what we found.


Benjamin Cooper is a final year medical student at King’s College London School of Medicine. He undertook this research as part of his intercalated BSc in Nutrition at King’s.


William Lee is a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, which is a postgraduate school of King’s College London. His main research concerns the odd fact that depressed people die younger than well people, from all kinds of causes, but no one knows why.


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It has been suggested that an acceptable basis in evidence for setting dietary guidelines is defined as a grading of ‘convincing’ or ‘probable’ (4). In our study week, we identified 37 articles containing 111 claims. Only 27 percent of these claims fell into this combined ‘convincing/probable’ category and, more worryingly, 65 percent and 62 percent (using the SIGN and WCRF grading system respectively) had an ‘insufficient’ evidence base, which means that there was no credible scientific basis for the claims.


WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR DIETARY ADVICE GIVEN BY THE MEDIA TO BE ACCURATE? The media has a significant influence over health behaviour decisions made by the public (5,6). For ex- ample, ‘disease awareness campaigns’ funded by the pharmaceutical industry in mainstream media tend to increase prescription of the sponsor’s medication for the condition being advertised (7). Similarly, incongru- ent claims contribute to public confusion regarding authoritative dietary advice: Lupton and Chapman (8) showed that in focus groups of 49 Australian residents discussing public response to a cholesterol controver- sy, a strategy of following an ‘everything in modera-


NHDmag.com December 2011 / January 2012 - Issue 70


tion approach’ was generally adopted in cases of confusion about dietary advice, regardless of official advice. Also, a major survey by the WCRF (9) of 2,404 UK residents, reported that 52 percent of respondents believed that scientists are ‘always changing their minds’ about healthy living advice and 27 percent of all respondents said that, because health advice always seems to be changing, the best approach is to ‘ignore it all and eat what you want’. Thus, misreport- ing by the media is likely to be causing preventable harm to the population.


HOW CAN WE IMPROVE THE VERACITY OF NEWSPAPER REPORTING? Various strategies have already been attempted in this area: the Royal Statistical Society gives training programmes on interpreting scientific evidence (10,11) and, in line with a recommendation of a recent gov- ernment report, has appointed a national coordinator for science journalism training (12,13). Another option is to improve newspaper literacy in relation to health. Trials of media literacy programmes in young women facilitating critical appraisal of portrayals of the female body in mainstream media have been shown to reduce risk factors for developing eating disorders (14,15). Since the science of health claims is of interest to the general public, relevant to health risk behaviour, and an area where the public are often misled, then critiquing misleading coverage may be an appropriate subject for school-age education and an appropriate target for health promotion activity.


THE ROLE OF THE DIETITIAN Even before the 2011 phone hacking scandal, in which illegal activity in the British press caused a newspaper to close, the public were suspicious of the motives and practices of the press: A poll carried out by YouGov in 2009 (16) found that 75 percent of the sample of 2,024 adults endorsed the statement, ‘Newspapers frequently publish stories they know are inaccurate’. In contrast to this, a poll of 1,026 people carried out by IPSOS MORI (17) found that 88 percent of people found doctors to be trustworthy, as compared to 19 percent feeling the same way about journalists. Patients already trust doctors far more than journalists and this is likely to be true for the professions allied to medicine. Dietitians can now have the confidence to contradict current and future nutritional nonsense from the media and to serve patients by giving dietary advice that they can trust to benefit their health.


For more information and article references please email: info@networkhealthgroup.co.uk


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