By: Rachel K.
I think most nutrition students have
experienced this before. You go home for a family
gathering, and Uncle Albert has recently heard that eating acai
berries every day reduces prostate cancer risk. Uncle
Albert is confused because last year he heard that acai berry
consumption increases prostate cancer risk. He expects you,
clearly an expert in all things nutrition, to give him a straight
answer (you actually study cholesterol absorption).
Sadly, Uncle Albert has become another
victim of scientific mis-communication. I recently read a
PhD comic strip the other day entitled the “Science
News Cycle” which does an excellent job of illustrating this
problem.
Many factors contribute to the contradictory
nutrition messages received by the lay public. First,
information is transmitted through so many channels that by the
time it reaches the lay audience, the message has been
altered. I envision this process as a giant game of
telephone (you know, the children's game where you whisper a
message in someone's ear and then pass it along until the
original message is no longer there).
In addition, journalists usually don't put
result in context. Cells and rats are not humans.
Researchers often use these model organisms to understand a piece
of a process which they could not study otherwise. They
never intended to make broad-based claims for humans with the
results of one of these studies.
Moreover, good science is repetitive and
methodical. It's usually far from glamorous, and to the lay
audience it can be - (scientists brace yourselves) - dry.
Consequently, science stated in proper context does not lend
itself to the entertainment reporting practiced today.
Journalists often “spice up” results to make them more exciting
but usually lose the true message.
Scientists are partially responsible
too. Scientists are trained for many years to do science –
but there is no formal training process for communicating results
in lay terms. Sometimes scientists just do a poor job of
explaining the results. Sometimes scientists overstate
results too.
I think the interpretation by the lay audience
is another problem. In high school, my teachers emphasized
the scientific method (you remember – identify problem, collect
data, generate hypothesis, test hypothesis, evaluate results,
state conclusions). Bing, bang, boom! They made
research sound so easy and so straightforward.
I discovered many years later that this
is a MYTH! Scientific research is rarely easy and almost
never straightforward. Your hypothesis is frequently wrong,
and results often contradict each other. Consequently, the
outcome of any one study will not change the way we view a
problem. It takes multiple studies by different research
groups to challenge old scientific dogma and add new
knowledge. Scientists are accustomed to this uncertainty,
but people who chose to do anything other than scientific
research professionally still picture it as bing, bang,
boom.
So the next time Uncle Albert asks a question,
spend a little time dispelling the scientific myth before you
tell him you don't know anything about acai berries.
