Hyping health risks

Quick! Drop that Angus burger, put down the coffee and move away from that cellphone before someone gets hurt or grows a third nipple! More talks with cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat about his book Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology and why not everything that makes good health headlines is good science.

What's your beef with hyping scientific research?

I've become allergic to people scaremongering and harping on only one corner of the findings of a study, giving a skewed summary of what's relevant rather than saying that, overall, there are reasons to believe there's not a lot to worry about.

What's so bad about hype?

The danger is if you hype everything, it steals attention away from real and proven risks. If a new report comes out, for instance, indicating that drinking even a few cups of coffee a day increases the risk of miscarriage—even if there are 20 previous studies, some of which are of better quality, that show no increased risk— the new report will be the one to get attention. Then there are the things people just don't want to hear, such as obesity being a proven risk factor for disease, and that we need to exercise, quit smoking or lose weight. It's easier to let these scares give us a diversion from doing the hard work and what's actually within our power.

But what about publicity serving as a precautionary tool? Wouldn't it have been better, say, if hype had received the attention of the public and policy-makers regarding real dangers such as smoking back in the '50s and '60s?

The problem is there are policy-setting groups that will take soft science, treat it as hard fact and set policy on it, which can have unintended consequences. The best example of this was in the early '90s with all the harping about a high-fat diet being linked to breast cancer. The hype was based on animal studies, studies of Japanese women and others. Subsequent, more careful studies showed no relationship between fat intake and breast cancer. But it took on a life of its own. Public health agencies advocated low fat, and the food industry got involved and produced low-fat everything by replacing the fat with starch and sugar. Now there is persuasive evidence that the rise in obesity in North America is due in part to this public health and industry focus on a low-fat diet.