LA Times Critical of UCLA HFCS Study
Posted: August 9, 2010
Every so often you come across a single well turned phrase that you wish had come out of your own mouth. I did so this morning while checking out a blog in the Los Angeles Times regarding the latest over-blown information purporting links between fructose sweetener and cancer.
Tami Dennis, health and science editor of the Los Angeles Times wrote the article about the recent UCLA study linking HFCS to the spread of pancreatic cancer contending that it could be an “overstatement.”
But the best line from the piece is a cutline under a lab photo accompanying her blog which said: “The road between a lab experiment and public policy is long. Or it should be.”
Wow! Words to live by. The UCLA hype is just the latest effort to take a free-standing nugget of information and attempt to pawn it off as scientific gospel akin to Galileo’s observation that gravity works.
Dennis cites the blog Respectful Insolence in her argument. “I hate science press releases that hype a study beyond its importance. I hate it even more when the investigators who published the study make statements not justified by the study and use the study as a jumping off point to speculate wildly.”
She is right on in her assessment. However, the problem is the UCLA news release got huge national exposure, fructose got another undeserved whack, and a small percentage of people who read the original news story will ever see the much lower profile condemnations of this shoddy approach to research.
Gilbert Ross, M.D., Executive Director and Medical Director of the American Council on Science and Health had a similar reaction to the UCLA gambit saying, “Both the authors and the press need to retract these alarmist and unsupported claims — especially the authors, since such gross over-interpretation of a lab study is inexcusable among academic scientists. They seem to be grasping for headlines and promoting some anti-fructose political agenda.”
For more background on this issue you might want to check out a much more thoughtful piece here.
Consumer Freedom Said,
August 13, 2010 @ 5:00 pm
Preach on. Another problem is that the stories mixed up “fructose” with “high fructose corn syrup.” High fructose corn syrup has about the same fructose content as refined table sugar and “natural” sugar: 50 percent. The study results were applied too broadly and wildly out of context. To play so fast and loose with something like cancer and carcinogens smacks of gross negligence of the facts.