I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.

io9.com ^ | 5/27/15 | John Bohannon

[Drango]

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily”, page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Here’s how we did it. The Setup

I got a call in December last year from a German television reporter named Peter Onneken. He and his collaborator Diana Löbl were working on a documentary film about the junk-science diet industry. They wanted me to help demonstrate just how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads. And Onneken wanted to do it gonzo style: Reveal the corruption of the diet research-media complex by taking part.

I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.

The call wasn’t a complete surprise. The year before, I had run a sting operation for Science on fee-charging open access journals, a fast-growing and lucrative new sector of the academic publishing business. To find out how many of those publishers are keeping their promise of doing rigorous peer review, I submitted ridiculously flawed papers and counted how many rejected them. (Answer: fewer than half.)

Onneken and Löbl had everything lined up: a few thousand Euros to recruit research subjects, a German doctor to run the study, and a statistician friend to massage the data. Onneken heard about my journal sting and figured that I would know how to pull it all together and get it published. The only problem was time: The film was scheduled to be aired on German and French television in the late spring (it premieres next week), so we really only had a couple of months to pull this off.

Could we get something published? Probably. But beyond that? I thought it was sure to fizzle. We science journalists like to think of ourselves as more clever than the average hack. After all, we have to understand arcane scientific research well enough to explain it. And for reporters who don’t have science chops, as soon as they tapped outside sources for their stories—really anyone with a science degree, let alone an actual nutrition scientist—they would discover that the study was laughably flimsy. Not to mention that a Google search yielded no trace of Johannes Bohannon or his alleged institute. Reporters on the health science beat were going to smell this a mile away. But I didn’t want to sound pessimistic. “Let’s see how far we can take this,” I said.

SNIP

http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800

[9YearLurker]

What is it with your nonsense?

It is below zero in NYC all the time. The low was freezing or below for April 5, 6, 7, and 8, 2002: http://www.almanac.com/weather/history/NY/New%20York/2002-04-04

And extreme water weight gain in such situations is common:
http://ask.metafilter.com/52458/Drugs-cause-45pound-weight-gain-in-5-days

You’re the one who started with posting that those who recognize that simple carbs, rather than animal fats, are problematic for health and a healthy weight.

The Framingham heart study, which was used to build a lot of the disinformation of the 20th century actually showed those who ate the most meat lived the longest. Ancel Keys selectively cherry picked only the not-great data that correlated animal fat and heart disease, but the full data shows an inverse relationship between animal fat consumption and mortality.

Here’s a WSJ treatment on the bogus data: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303678404579533760760481486

And here’s a report on how important Keys was to the animal fat/cholesterol misinformation: http://www.perfecthealthinstitute.com/aANCELKEYS.html

I don’t know why you’re gripping bad data in your jaws like a dog bone, but you’re way off track.

[PA Engineer]

Thanks for the links. You might find this interesting:

The Great Starvation Experiment, 1944-1945

[9YearLurker]

Thanks, I’d seen another site on that—pretty gross and amazing.

[9YearLurker]

Here’s another great link on Ancel Keys—who of course started the animal fat nonsense:

http://www.perfecthealthinstitute.com/aANCELKEYS.html

[fireman15]

Are you a member of PETA?

No, I grew up riding horses and helping raise our family's beef cattle, hogs, goats, and chickens. We ate them all and still do.

My only agenda is trying to keep people from following horrific nutritional advice from a dead crackpot. I helped perform CPR on so many fat out of shape men during my 25 year career that the thought of my friends ending up the same way really bothers me. These were mostly needless preventable deaths.

You are free to believe whatever you want. I only want to remind you that 1 out of 4 men in this country die from heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men in this country. It is not the wisest course of action to play these kinds of games with the health of your heart. I know this from bitter experience.

[fireman15]

And extreme water weight gain in such situations is common:

Gaining 68 pounds in 9 days while in a coma is basically unheard of. The fact that you are capable of believing such nonsense explains a great deal about how it is possible for you to believe in other nonsense.