How Poor Science and Misleading Media Coverage Create Public Confusion About How Dietary Supplements Affect Health

http://www.naturalhealthresearch.org/nhri/?p=393

Poor scientific work done by physicians and scientists - plus a lack of proper filters in journalism’s coverage of science – is contributing to misleading and contradictory dietary supplement health information seen by consumers, leading to them making poor health choices. This is a review of some of the problems that have occurred, which will continue until they are exposed and challenged.

KEY and COLLEAGUES, Cancer Epidemiology Unit, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF,[1] Health Sciences Research Institute, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL[2] and The Edgar National Centre for Diabetes Research and the Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand[3] studied cancer risk among meat eaters, non-meat eaters who ate fish (fish eaters) and vegetarians.

BACKGROUND: Few prospective studies have examined cancer incidence among vegetarians.The author pooled the analysis of data from two prospective studies in the United Kingdom, namely the Oxford Vegetarian Study (Appleby et al, 1999) and the EPIC-Oxford cohort (Davey et al, 2003).
In the Oxford Vegetarian Study, participants were recruited throughout the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1984 (Thorogood et al, 1994). Vegetarian participants were recruited through advertisements, the news media and word of mouth, and non-vegetarian participants were recruited as friends and relatives of the vegetarian participants. A semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire was completed at the time of recruitment, and information was collected on smoking and exercise habits, alcohol drinking, social class, weight and height and reproductive factors in women.