London - The idea that chocolate can help make you thin was probably always too good to be true.
But that didn't stop the world's media rushing to publish research which suggested just that.
Recently, however, a US journalist revealed that he conned news organisations into running dubious research as part of a stunt to highlight how easy it is for questionable health information to spread.
The journalist had his deeply flawed academic study published in a journal - with the bogus conclusions then picked up by Germany's biggest-selling paper and tabloid websites in the UK.
His stunt, which raises questions about the checking mechanisms of some journals and the ability of news organisations to identify flawed science, led to headlines such as “Chocolate accelerates weight loss”, “Excellent news: chocolate can help you lose weight!” and “Dieting? Don't forget the chocolate”.
The science journalist John Bohannon said he and German documentary-makers did carry out a study but with an unscientifically small sample size of just 15 people - something that he omitted from the paper published by the International Archives of Medicine. This was previously run by the well-established publisher BioMed Central but is now under new ownership.
The test subjects were split into three groups: one on a low-carbohydrate diet, another on the same but including a bar of chocolate a day, and a control group eating what they liked. It found the chocolate-eaters lost weight 10 percent faster than the other low-carb dieters. The paper concluded: “Consumption of chocolate with a high cocoa content can significantly increase the success of weight-loss diets.”
After it was published by the journal, a press release was sent out to media outlets and the story ran in Germany's Bild newspaper, the Irish Examiner, Huffington Post India and several in the UK, including the Daily Express.
Only one journalist tried to find out the size of sample, which was so low that it was almost bound to produce a false result.
“You might as well read tea leaves as try to interpret our results. Chocolate may be a weight-loss accelerator, or it could be the opposite,” Mr Bohannon wrote in an essay for the iO9 blog website. “Journalists are becoming the de facto peer-review system. And when we fail, the world is awash in junk science.”
Carlos Vazquez, of the journal's publisher iMedPub, said: “That article was published by mistake when it was being reviewed. Indeed the article was finally rejected, although it appeared online for some hours.”
The Independent