How a Scientist Fooled Millions With Bizarre Chocolate Diet Claims

__roo writes: Did you know chocolate helps you lose weight? You can read all about this great news for chocoholics in the Daily Star, Daily Express, Irish Examiner, and TV shows in Texas and Australia, and even the front page of Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper. The problem is that it's not true. A researcher who previously worked with Science to do a sting operation on fee-charging open access journals ran a real—but obviously flawed—study rigged to generate false positives, paid €600 to get it published in a fee-charging open access journal, set up a website for a fake institute, and issued press releases to feed the ever-hungry pool of nutrition journalists. The doctor who ran the trial had the idea to use chocolate, because it's a favorite of the "whole food" fanatics. "Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you. It's like a religion."

Comments

chocolate helped me lose weight

[turkeydance]

i just don't eat it.

Re:Because I did not read the original article...

[Ignacio]

It was never science in the first place. He used known flaws in experimentation to prove that you can make the mainstream publish anything. Which was the point he was trying to make.

Required reading: xkcd's "Significance"

[dwheeler]

xkcd's "Significance" pithily explains p-hacking.

I trust Dr. Oz

[Anonymous Coward]

I trust Dr. Oz. He told me about this new miracle chocolate infused coffee bean oil that I could rub on my butt hole to make me loose weight. It's exclusively sold on his website and it really works. I mean, Dr. Oz wouldn't lie me, he's a Dr!

Re:Heh.

[Curunir_wolf]

People are still refusing to vaccinate children because they're afraid of autism even though the author of that study actually confessed having made the whole thing up.

Ummm... no, he didn't. There were a couple of issues with the study, the primary one being that a temporal association between the administration of the vaccine and the onset of autistic enterocolitis should never have implied causality. The study was important because it identified the colon symptoms present in a subset of patients with ASD as a distinct disorder. But it was misinterpreted in the press, especially for a study where the primary findings involved only 12 patients.

The main author never signed on to the minor retraction. There was nothing close to a confession of "making the whole thing up", but some (questionable) researchers from other institutions have made that accusation.