A Guide to Digesting the News
How you do read the news on health and nutrition? Each week, our Eater’s Digest Monday newsletter brings you the latest nutrition, health and prevention news. But when you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll notice that the news can seem quite contradictory from week to week.
Something is really good for youor maybe it’s notno, wait, it really is! If you followed the advice in each article you read, you might be drinking coffee one week, quitting the next, then brewing up a fresh pot again the following week.
Each week we select news items to feature based on what’s in the news and what topics are of interest to our readers. Occasionally, we’ll feature a more light-hearted piece, but most of the news stories we select are directly relevant to your well-being. The legitimacy of the news outlet offering a story also greatly influences our selection – so we are doing a little pre-sifting for you.
But we’d also like to offer the advice we were given by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They suggest that asking yourself the following questions will help you read news about research studies more critically:
1. How strong were the study methods?
2. How convincing was the study?
3. How well-written was the news article about the study?
4. In what journal was the research originally published?
Critical reading alone won’t help you grasp the full context of a news story on health and nutrition, but these questions can help you develop a general picture of the strengths and limitations of the story. And that will help you put the news in perspective.
For scientists, the accumulation of sometimes-different findings is evidence of a healthy scientific enterprise in which the same question is approached repeatedly from multiple angles. This continues until there is enough information for experts to pull together all the findings, consider the “weight of evidence” and reach a nuanced understanding – one that may, where appropriate, help guide action.
In assessing the weight of evidence, studies with stronger methods are given more weight. Other factors considered include funding sources (for instance, whether a study was funded by an industry that can profit from its results). But rarely is any one study considered enough to really understand a problem and provide sound advice to consumers – except when the results suggest there may be direct danger.
For consumers, this layering of findings can be confusing. Worse, it can even lead to a distrust of scientific evidence in general. However, with a little practice, you can become skilled at “digesting” news stories that summarize scientific evidence and gain valuable information!
