"Top Story: An Orange a Day Keeps Stroke Away." That was the blaring subject line of an email that hit my inbox early this morning from MedPageToday, a highly respected source of news about important medical research.
Needless to say, the "click bait" got my attention so I went straight to the item on the MedPageToday site. Even as I was doing that, versions of the orange-a-day story based on a study done at the University of East Anglia in Norwich UK were popping up all over the web on sites ranging from a blog called "The Heart of the Matter" to Health.India.com to the world's most popular online newspaper, MailOnline.
But wait! Before you rush out and buy a crate of Florida's finest in the interest of staving off an attack on your brain cells, read the MedPageToday "Action Points" summary of the study on which the news item was based: “Citrus fruits/juices are the main dietary source of flavanones, and in this study they tended to be associated with a reduced risk for ischemic stroke, but the association did not reach significance.” [Italics are mine.]
And here's the conclusion written by the authors of the study themselves in a paper published in the April issue of "Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association": "Citrus fruit consumption may be associated with a reduction in stroke risk, and experimental data support these epidemiological associations that the flavanone content of citrus fruits may potentially be cardioprotective. Further prospective studies are needed to confirm these associations. [Again, italics are mine.]
Look, there's no question that oranges are good for you so I'm not arguing that you should ignore them as part of a healthy diet. All I'm doing is being contrarian about the way health news on the web in our information overload age can be so seriously redacted as to become all but meaningless. Sites everywhere on the Internet are hungry for headlines around the clock. Consequently, each little study published somewhere, whether peer reviewed or not, gets plucked and posted and often goes pretty much viral. Not only that, but many of the studies admit that the research did not show cause and effect but only "association" or a possible "link." In addition, a lot of the studies are "observational" and/or rely on self-reported data that can be entirely subjective.
In fact MedPageToday has historically blasted exactly the kind of hype headlines I'm discussing here. For example, in a December 14th 2011 post entitled "Daily Drumbeat of Unhelpful Breast Cancer News," Gary Schwitzer wrote: "This is about a HealthDay story headlined, 'British Study Suggests Mammograms Do More Harm Than Good,' that fails to address the big picture -- much less what this same news organization reported just two days earlier . . . I don’t mean to pick on HealthDay. This could have been any news source; I just saw it on HealthDay because we monitor their work daily."
Hats off to MedPageToday for that item, and also for telling the truth about the orange-a-day story even if finding the nugget took some digging into the whole story after reading the lead, which was admittedly more honest than the headline: "A compound found in oranges, grapefruit, and other citrus fruit may modestly reduce stroke risk among women, an observational study determined."
The lesson in all of this, I believe, is that journalists and consumers alike need to be alert to what constitutes responsible reporting as opposed to eyeball-grabbing headlines. Here at ThirdAge, we are committed to doing our best to achieve exactly that. A key way that we accomplish our goal is to use qualifying verbs such as "can" or "may" when studies we rely on as sources have limitations. In other words, we would have opted to tweak that MedPageToday "top story" subject line so that it read like this: "An Orange a Day May Keep Stroke Away."
Now go have an orange. Hey, the Vitamin C alone can't hurt. And those flavanones? Why not hedge your bets and assume that they may help save you from succumbing to an ischemic attack? Just don't count on it.
