Ben Goldacre
Thursday February 24, 2005
The Guardian

· Everybody’s debunking these days, even those heroes of extrapolation, the nutritionists. Take Angela Dowden, writing in the Mirror this week, under the heading: “Top nutritionist on the ‘functional fare’ fad.” The news archives are inevitably full of articles by someone called Angela Dowden lucratively promoting the functional food fad. But anyway, look, I’m not going to be mealy mouthed about this [coughs] I just wish she’d get her balls out and debunk with gusto. Here’s what she has to say about a magnificently bonkers product called Night Time semi-skimmed milk (89p for 750ml; 30p for a 250ml glass): “The theory: Naturally higher in melatonin ‘for a good night’s sleep’. Melatonin is a sleep-inducing hormone produced by the brain’s pineal gland and also contained in milk. Night Time has twice the level found in a normal pint. Does it work? Nice idea but there has been no research on the milk to show it actually works … 3/10.”

· OK, come on. We don’t need a large negative randomised control trial to call this one out. For a start, you could just drink two glasses of milk. I rang Night Time: its representative didn’t want to tell me how much melatonin was in the milk because that was commercially sensitive material, but did agree that it was nothing like the doses in the melatonin tablets you can buy in America and also that it wouldn’t be sedating if you drank Night Time during the day. They just milk their cows in the morning, because melatonin is made overnight and some of it comes out in milk. This milk, I would say, is milk.

· Night Time picked up the phone after the third ring, and the whole operation took about four minutes in total, and I reckon that the Guardian probably pays me much less for that effort than the Mirror pays Angela Dowden. The bottom line is, I’m wasted here in the science section. I want my own nutrition column. It could go something like this.

· Melatonin is naturally produced by your own body overnight, and helps to set the diurnal cycle. It has mild sedating effects and is fat-soluble so it slips over the membranes in your kidneys and comes out whole in your urine. It’s the first piss of the day that you want (although do collect any that you do overnight and pop them in the fridge), and I’d recommend only drinking the middle half, because the first and last quarters have a bit more gunk in them. It’s tasty, thrifty, faddy and high in melatonin. I tried it this morning, and I have to say, I’m feeling tremendously relaxed.

Ben Goldacre
Thursday February 17, 2005
The Guardian

· OK, look, I know I’m picky, so forgive me for what I’m about to do, because it’s probably not very fair. Nigel Hawkes, the health editor of the Times, wrote an article two weeks ago about how having younger siblings can reduce your risk of developing multiple sclerosis. “The ‘hygiene hypothesis’ is that increasing cleanliness and absence of disease has led to the rise of several autoimmune diseases, including asthma, arthritis and now MS,” he says, which is quite true. There is that hypothesis, and it has been around for about 40 years. “This new study lends support to the idea,” he said, referring to the paper, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which his article was about.

· He described the findings of the paper very well (I’m not being patronising, I’m being honest, he did). The researchers found that “if, by the age of six, children had one younger sibling, their risk of MS was reduced by 30%; if they had two, risk was reduced by 67%.” It is a pretty interesting finding. And there is more: “In addition, the greater the exposure to younger siblings, the later the onset of the disease [MS]. But there was no benefit in having older brothers and sisters, or if the age gap was greater than six years.”

· That is what they found, says the Times. It is what they found. So here’s my problem. This is what the Times also said: “MS is an autoimmune disease caused by the immune system turning against its host and destroying the myelin sheath that surrounds nerve fibres.” True. But then: “This is more likely to happen if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to infections from younger siblings, says the study.” Well, I don’t know about that. The data from the study certainly could support that hypothesis. The authors of the study may have a strong suspicion that the hygiene hypothesis is indeed the most parsimonious explanation for their data. But the experiment did not say that the immune system is more likely to turn against its host and destroy the myelin sheath if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to “infections” from younger siblings. It just said it is more likely to if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to younger siblings. To my mind, the Times confused hypothesis and data. And the fact that this small difference annoys me so much is proof that I am, in fact, the pickiest man in the world.

Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk

Ben Goldacre
Thursday February 10, 2005

Men are from Mars, and Women are from Venus. Not only did this thesis shift 30m books for Dr John Gray, PhD, it has also provided the branding for his new, exciting diet plan based on Mars and Venus Supershakes. Gray’s PhD, meanwhile, is from Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
Thursday February 10, 2005
The Guardian

· You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m still alive. Unless you’re from Penta Water. I was feeling terribly afraid after its text messages saying things like, “Practice [sic] keeping one eye open.” But then you sleuths rallied round.

· Everyone and their dog emailed in about Penta’s tussle with James Randi, stage magician and debunker of nonsense. He has $1m on offer for anyone who can demonstrate under controlled conditions that something vaguely spooky is happening - the spookiest thing is that it has remained unclaimed for years. Penta’s ambitious claim that seeds germinate in half the time in Penta Water, compared with normal water, seems like a pretty easy experiment, suggests Randi. Perhaps someone could finally take that $1m off his hands. Penta triumphantly announces it will try for the prize (www.randi.org/jr/08-24-01.html) and Randi suggests independently verifying the experiment. Penta wants to use some weird “Bio Impedance Analyser” to test how hydrated humans get on their water, instead. No problem, says Randi, gamely, use anything you like, let’s say you just have to identify correctly which type of water, Penta or non-Penta, was drunk by 37 out of the 50 subjects. But then, as if by magic, in a puff of suggestions that it might sue, Penta disappears, saying it doesn’t have the resources to nominate one trusted person to watch an experiment it is so confident will net it $1m. It doesn’t threaten him with violence. Maybe Penta was worried that Randi might have magical powers, too.

· But Bad Science sleuth of the week goes to Ray Girvan of ace debunking blog Apothecary’s Drawer, because he found out that Penta UK is run by Debbie Flint, “the original queen of shopping telly” and author of Freedom Eating: “This natural weight loss method has systematically helped thousands of people to break free from Food Prison.” I think we can imagine what kind of weight loss system “freedom eating” is. “There are three accompanying CDs with a retail value of over £36. CD Three is Audio Chocolate by LJ Rich, music to help you lose weight by!!” Brilliant. And in June 2000 in the News of the World: “TV shopping channel beauty Debbie Flint became the target of sick phone pests - after her number was listed in the Mensa directory of Britain’s brainiest people.” Mensa? “When I started getting these unpleasant calls out of the blue I couldn’t for the life of me work out why I was being picked on,” said Debbie. Neither can I.

Not by a long chalk

Ben Goldacre
Thursday February 3, 2005
The Guardian

· Sometimes people ask: what are your qualifications, to decide what is and isn’t bad science? The answer is Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
Thursday February 3, 2005
The Guardian

· Sometimes people ask: what are your qualifications, to decide what is and isn’t bad science? The answer is that it doesn’t take much. Take the new television advert for cleaning product Cillit Bang: “Limescale is simply calcium that sticks, and if solid calcium dissolves this fast [lump of solid calclium starts fizzing], imagine how Cillit Bang works on taps and sinks.” Limescale is not calcium that sticks. Limescale is calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is a chalky substance rather a lot like, let’s say … chalk. You may have noticed the white cliffs of Dover not fizzing. Whereas calcium is a shiny silver metallic substance that is shiny, silver, and a metal, unlike limescale and chalk. When you throw a lump of calcium into water, like most people did aged 15, it fizzes and dissolves. And all those of you who thought calcium was white and opaque like teeth and bones and milk: isn’t it great to peer behind the curtain?

· Of course, some people don’t appreciate critical appraisal of their ideas. There isn’t enough room in the paper for me to pour sufficient bile on the ludicrous claims of Penta water, so I wasn’t going to bother, but now I’m strangely motivated. After last week’s piece about their failure to provide compelling evidence for bizarre claims about clustered water (uncritically written up in half a dozen national publications) I started receiving nasty, menacing text messages from them. Imagine this buzzing into your pocket: “Goldmember I do hope you are a better physician than you are a journalist when we publish you will of course be informed out of the decency/courtesy you didn’t show to us! Sleep well tonight and think about how and why you tried to fuck us over and practice [sic] keeping one eye open.” Needless to say, I’ve gone to the police. When I say I don’t like being threatened, I don’t say that to sound tough. I mean, it’s not very nice being threatened. In fact, they sent it twice, just so that I could be in no doubt. Then suddenly I started getting calls from PR guru Max Clifford to apologise for a “hotheaded” Penta staff member.

· Now, how often do you reckon a loser science journalist gets a call from Max Clifford PR? Weirdly, I last got one about six months ago, when we were looking into someone you may remember. She was called Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. What could she have in common with Penta water? They have each been the subject of more than five Bad Science columns. But, hang on, Penta’s only been in two. So far, that is.