When science becomes fake

Fake news

Has it ever happened to you that while scrolling through your social media feed, you come across a random post that reads: “Researchers conclude that drinking one glass of champagne a week prevents cancer”, or “study says that chocolate is beneficial for pregnant women”? At least, it happens quite often to me. It is interesting to note that the general population finds these headlines appealing and even dare to recommend, comment on, and share them. The noble intention of sharing notable scientific work is still hidden into these ”science” communication efforts. Us, humans, are rational beings at our core. At the end of the day, we want to understand HOW and WHY things happen.

The aim of science – Truth and accuracy

As philosophical as it may sound: ”the aim of science is to build true and accurate knowledge about how the world works.” True and accurate, simple words that imply the whole rigor that drives science. To help demonstrate these attributes of science I will use the example of chocolate being beneficial for pregnant women.

This is what you will see in your browser, if you type ”chocolate”, ”study, and ”pregnancy” in your search engine:

First of all, when you follow the link you will not be able to find a formal reference to the study, or who the authors are. It took me a couple of targeted searches to find the study titled: ”High-flavanol chocolate to improve placental function and to decrease the risk of preeclampsia: a double blind randomized clinical trial” (find the abstract here). Bujold and colleages, the authours of this study, used very interesting wording when concluding their results. Using the abstract (because no scientific paper has yet been published), we can read some of the researcher’s statements and start to be critical about how true and accurate the content of the link indeed was.

Dissecting the chocolate

1. In this study 129 pregnant women at risk for developing preeclampsia (a high blood pressure condition during pregnancy) were recruited. These pregnant women received either high-flavanol or low-flavanol chocolate for 12 weeks.
2. Before and after the chocolate intervention, the participants had an ultrasound, called doppler, to study the bloodflow to the uterus.
3. When the researchers compared ‘before and after’ groups for both chocolate types, they saw that bloodflow was increased with the interventions.
4. However, when they compared the effect of both chocolates, they saw no significant difference.
5. They also reported, that these patients did not have different rates of preeclampsia, implying that their risk of developing preeclampsia remained the same.

Here is where the story gets interesting

For the conclusion the authors clearly state that the different concentrations of flavanol in chocolate did not elicit any observable difference between groups. The authors concluded with a broad and valid statement: “Nevertheless, the marked improvement of the pulsatility index observed in the 2 chocolate groups might suggest that chocolate effects are not solely and directly due to flavanol content”. The hype occurred. Is this conclusion true? Is this conclusion accurate? What do you think?

Press releases, news coverage, interviews, morning talk-shows that were in charge of communicating the facts, communicated the fake. They started recommending the daily ingest of chocolate, similar to the set-up of the study. Of course, this hype reached us, and here we are, trying to make some sense out of it. You may think: ”it is just chocolate in minimal amounts, it would not harm a pregnant lady”, and you may be correct. However, the approach of over-simplifying science to make it appealing, has been used for everything:

• drinking alcohol is better than exercise
• grape seeds killing cancer cells
• smelling farts to live longer
• give 8 hugs a day to be truly happy

In order to keep this post short, I want to add that the critical attitude of the scientist that lives inside us should arise more often. We can view, evaluate and criticize studies and statements asking with healthy skepticism: is this true? is this accurate?, let us not take for granted that everything published is.

Image credit: parenting.firstcry.com