Journalists confused an opinion piece for an alcohol-cancer study

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/that-time-a-bunch-of-journalists-confused-an-opinion-piece-for-a-study/

by legodt • 10 years ago

198 91 10 years ago

Doesn't greater alcohol consumption correlate with tobacco use and other adverse behaviors? It think they're making quite a stretch to say that the cause is the alcohol.

summarite• 10 years ago

I think you should look at the background papers before making such a bold and unwarranted dismissal. Any researcher worth their salt will make sure to at least try to exclude other factors, and any good peer reviewer and journal editor will point out if this is missing. So if papers consistently find this link chances are very good it's there.

helloworld• 10 years ago

Actually, this might be an example of the "healthy user" bias in observational studies.[1] Although epidemiologists do try hard to include all of the relevant variables in their analyses, there are likely unidentified individual differences (perhaps including personality and lifestyle) that distinguish people with better health outcomes.

That's why double-blind, randomized, controlled trials provide more compelling evidence of cause and effect.

[1] Do we really know what makes us healthy? NY Times Magazine, Sept. 16, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t....

TelmoMenezes• 10 years ago

"The effects of characteristics of the studies, of selected covariates (tobacco) and of the gender of individuals included in the studies, were also investigated as putative sources of heterogeneity of the estimates."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2363992/

Take a look at the papers before saying things like this.

dang• 10 years ago

The 'study' was discussed yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142140, but this is more a media story, so we can treat it as a separate topic.

elgabogringo4• 10 years ago

Science and economic journalism are both pretty bad. My favorite thing (ok, one of my favorite things) about blogging/internet is that I can read real-time thoughts/opinions from actual scientists and economists now instead of having to rely on professional writers and media.

mc322• 10 years ago

Social science is quite bad. Reporters on, KQED for example, will cite a single study to bolster their opinion on something. It'll go along the lines of, "UC Davis ran a study which concluded giving money directly to the homeless with no strings attached had the best results". But they won't say how many people were involved, what other studies this was compared to, how it was conducted, were there studies with opposite conclusions, etc., etc.

Houshalter2• 10 years ago

My favorite is when there is a legitimate controversy in the field, and outsiders cherry pick which side to listen to. Person A references a study that just so happens to support his existing opinion. Person B searches and finds a study that contradicts it. Person A finds some criticism of that study and claims it's been "debunked". And so on, back and forth.

You end up with 2 sides that believe their opinions have been absolutely confirmed by science, and have impressive sounding statistics and studies to reference. When in reality the facts are still uncertain and there is no consensus.

IIRC something like this happened with minimum wage debates. With some studies showing the effect of a higher minimum wage was positive, and others showing it was negative. Almost any political issue will have some of this.

jsprogrammer• 10 years ago

I've heard that actual scientists and economists are just a type of professional writer, as they must "publish or perish". I've even heard that in those publications, there is a push towards constructing narratives and telling stories.

Do you know of scientists or economists who aren't paid to write that I can read from?

smt88• 10 years ago

scientists and economists are just a type of professional writer

While true, they're only supposed to write things that can be independently reproduced and verified. If they have to layer narratives on top of their work to get people to care, I don't see any harm in that as long as it doesn't stray outside of the lines of fact.

A problem I've seen myself is that the original scientists aren't always the ones marketing their work. There's someone else (a layperson) at the university paid to do that, and they will often make claims that aren't substantiated by the original research.

robotresearcher4• 10 years ago

Do you know of scientists or economists who aren't paid to write that I can read from?

What a weird selection criterion. It rejects all the professional scientists, by your description.

elgabogringo4• 10 years ago

Good point. I thought about this a bit more and, to be honest, I read very few academics. Not intentionally, but it worked out that way.

Strangely, some of the smarter, best informed people I read are just regular people without any journalistic or academic qualifications in the field they write on.

On second thought, maybe that's not as strange as it seems.

mancerayder• 10 years ago

Project Syndicate, while filled with opinion pieces, are opinion pieces by people who don't necessarily get paid. They have other agendas. That said, it's a forum for their essays as opposed to a left / right paper. People like Roubini and Stephen Roach, essayist economists, get published there. The comments there are in the same genre of intelligent and interesting as Hacker News.

lhnz• 10 years ago

I can read real-time thoughts/opinions from actual scientists and economists now instead of having to rely on professional writers and media.

Who do you read, and have you seen this?

https://github.com/j2kun/blogs-by-experts

elgabogringo4• 10 years ago

Too many to list easily, but I've found over time that I read fewer and fewer professional pundits, opiners, and journalists.

jdietrich• 10 years ago

All journalism is pretty bad. Non-experts are producing content under severe time constraints. Most newspapers barely have a budget for copy editing, let alone fact checking. Take journalism for what it is - disposable content written in a hurry.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

jasonjei• 10 years ago

What I find interesting (perhaps confusing is the better word for me) is that the other article from a few days ago that proclaimed drinking leads to cancer didn't mention that the moderate drinkers have fewer risk factors than the control group of abstainers. (The OP article does indicate the result, however.)

So what is it? Is moderate drinking helping? Or is it the lifestyle of moderation helping?

From the National Cancer Institute: "Can drinking red wine help prevent cancer? Researchers conducting studies using purified proteins, human cells, and laboratory animals have found that certain substances in red wine, such as resveratrol, have anticancer properties (16)."[0]

Meanwhile, the same National Cancer Institute source writes that "[b]ased on extensive reviews of research studies, there is a strong scientific consensus of an association between alcohol drinking and several types of cancer (1, 2)."[0]

Drinking causes cancer but red wine is known to have anticancer properties? Abstainers in one study have higher risk factors than moderate drinkers?

[0] http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/al...

HillaryBriss• 10 years ago

I think it's unclear that the amount of resveratrol found in a few glasses of red wine is truly therapeutic.

Also, it's possible to get resveratrol from red grapes and peanuts in amounts roughly comparable to that found in red wine.

http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/dietary-factors/phytochemical...

DanBC• 10 years ago

You should not drink red wine to reduce your risk of cancer.

If you're worried about cancer you should reduce your alcohol consumption to less than about one drink per day.

The definition of "one drink" is a bit confusing.

There are other things that are more important: stop smoking and be careful in the sun are the two obvious ones.

percept• 10 years ago

"IARC list ethanol in alcoholic beverages as Group 1 carcinogens and arguments "There is sufficient evidence for the carcinogenicity of acetaldehyde (the major metabolite of ethanol) in experimental animals.""

(Wikipedia, citing http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Classification/Classifications...)

dahart• 10 years ago

While these errors may appear minor to some, confusing an opinion piece with research is likely to seem disturbing, if not egregious, to those in the scientific community.

This is far from a new problem, and this particular piece is far from egregious, relatively speaking, considering how bad public science reporting is in general in the mass media.

John Oliver had fun with it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw

wang_li2• 10 years ago

Why should we hold journalists to a higher standard than science journals? It was only a week and a half ago that JAMA did the same thing: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2533698

RA_Fisher• 10 years ago

Several times I've asked authors in JAMA articles for the data (synthetic is fine!) + code used to generate the results. A few have been polite enough to respond and decline.

Also, notice many of JAMA's published graphs on Twitter and in papers have no visual representation of uncertainty. Point estimates are fairly bankrupt plotted by themselves.

jlarocco2• 10 years ago

Just because some other group is also wrong doesn't mean it's okay.

They're both being held to the same standard, and they're both failing.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

tstactplsignore• 10 years ago

How is this the same thing? The JAMA article is a factually correct article clearly presenting a specific viewpoint. There are pieces like that in journals all the time, and there should be.

The original post here is talking about the misrepresentation of what is a viewpoint / opinion piece as a scientific study in the mainstream news media. They have nothing to do with each other.

wang_li2• 10 years ago

It's a one sided opinion piece that completely fails to be objective about the success of the ACA. Additionally, it wasn't peer reviewed, so it's a stretch to claim that it's factually accurate.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-berezow-hartsfiel...

1ris2• 10 years ago

I'd like to know how my drinking behaviour affects my mortality. And how that effect is compared to the consumption of tobacco, marijuana, participating in road traffic, jogging and overwight.

While it's clear that alcohol is not particular healthy, I feel the risk is negligible compared to other common behaviours. I like alcohol very much and I'd like to make a informed decision about it. But i dearly miss the curial, end-user friendly information.

chestervonwinch2• 10 years ago

About 3 drinks per day puts you from 1.5 to 3 times more likely to develop various cancers, according to:

http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/al...

brador• 10 years ago

It's just sugary yeast water though. My guess is it's the obesity from drinking that increases the chance of the cancers not the drink itself. Which has then created a correlation between alcohol and the cancers cited.

1ris2• 10 years ago

Yes, this is what I'm referring to. This information is completly meaningless to me. How does a 1.5 to 3 times higher cancer risk affect my mortality?

A 100 times elevated risk in extreme uncommon diseases is absoluty irrelevant, but a 10 percent increase to get something very common is quite important. Likewise is the age when these disease typically break out. If it's typically not before 85, I wouldn't mind. If it's often before 40, I would dearly.

I know that alcohol increases the risk for prostate cancer. But prostate cancer typically starts at very high age and is usually just a minor hassle. The typical infected person dies of something else and has a usual life expectancy.

How to these factors from 1.5 to 3 affect my mortality? Should I care? I want to say something like say "I'm drinking $n drinks a week, and in order to compensate that I stop doing other things with a similar risk".

tshtf• 10 years ago

"Light-to-moderate alcohol consumption has been shown in several prospective studies to reduce the risk of all-cause mortality and several cardiac outcomes, including cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality in men "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3140194/

lern_too_spel2• 10 years ago

See the articles that cited that one, and a different picture emerges.

"Beneficial associations between low intensity alcohol consumption and all cause mortality may in part be attributable to inappropriate selection of a referent group and weak adjustment for confounders."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4353285/

wwweston• 10 years ago

I'm more or less lifelong teetotal, but about 4 years ago, I started considering light drinking based off of widely popular reports of health benefits of the occasional glass of wine and some all-cause mortality reduction studies.

Given that I wasn't sure how well the media had reported these and if I was either motivated enough of or enough of a scientist to evaluate research directly, I decided to ask doctors if I should do this. In short, to provide me with curial end-user friendly information.

So I've pretty much asked most MD I've seen since, five total. The responses fell into two categories:

* "Eh, if you already drink, it's probably OK, but for heavens sake, of all the new things to take up for health benefits, one could do so much better. Get your exercise, diet, dental health, stress levels, and sleep quality dialed in, then maybe statins, then maybe a glass of wine for health."

* "We never advise people to start. There are too many risks. If you enjoy alcohol, be responsible and moderate, but it the opposite of an asset to your health."

Of course, doctors aren't perfect, I have a limited sample of them, and I may not be summarizing their response correctly. It's probably best for most people to ask doctors directly along with conducting what review of medical literature they can if they're up to it.

lostlogin5• 10 years ago

It's not a hard subject to research yourself and I would bet that it wouldn't take too long to be more up to date that a lot of the people you have gone to see.

lucaspiller• 10 years ago

I like alcohol very much

Could I ask what you actually like about it? I used to be a moderate drinker but a few years ago I just thought "what's the point?". The only reason why I drank was because my friends drank, and nearly all the times I met my friends was to drink.

Since then I've moved to a different city for work, and I've made new friends with mostly people who don't drink. Yesterday we went to a lake to swim and chill out, which I couldn't even dream about doing with my old friends.

A lot of people who I've spoken to who like to drink say it helps their stress levels. In my case I've always been quite a stressful person, and I haven't noticed it get worse since I've stopped. Not having woken up hung over for over 2 years is good though :D

As for the supposed health benefits of drinking, I think in my case I'm better off not drinking. A few times I got blind drunk, but even being tipsy I would be concerned about accidentally walking in front of a car or slipping onto a railway track.

ascorbic• 10 years ago

Good alcoholic drinks taste great, and there are few non-alcoholic drinks that can match the complexity of flavour that you'll find in the best of them. And of course the effects of the alcohol in a couple of drinks feel nice too. I very rarely get actually drunk to the extent of feeling ill, but I'll have a beer or two most days because I really like beer. Beer is my favourite because really great stuff is relatively accessible. I can buy best the beers in the world for the cost of a pretty average bottle of wine. I can buy a bottle of Duvel in a convenience store for less than any bottle of wine they sell (admittedly most convenience stores don't sell it, but almost all supermarkets do). I can buy a 75cl bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru for £12. You couldn't get an empty bottle of a Bordeaux Grand Cru for that!

nchelluri• 10 years ago

I think modern journalism is like application development at a startup, except with even less QA. "Get it out!!! Get it out!!!" And since people will forget about the article in a few days anyway, as long as nobody who knows better and knows how to make the right noise about it and has enough energy, time, and incentive to actually do so reads it and starts the correction ball rolling, it's just, kinda... there. Archived to be read by no one but Google and someone doing a long tail search some years to come, hopefully with no more important purpose than writing a paper for school that again, will be disposed of, this time more thoroughly.

We just create so much crap for consumption. Even public broadcasting is full of the 24-72hr news cycle. I've written code that I was employed for where I was like, why are we doing this. I assume journalists are the same.

quantumhobbit• 10 years ago

It is a race to the bottom as long as we value speed over quality. It is a shame too because I think consumers would really prefer quality over speed for software and news, I know I would. But consumption of these things isn't a rational deliberation by the consumer, but a reflex click or don't click. Hence the proliferation of click bait headlines and bs startup promises.

I think the key is reputation and branding. When all news sources are crappy, I will stick to whatever is free and at the top of my feed. Maybe this is why pay walls are a failing strategy, none of the pay walled papers have a good enough reputation for quality to justify the expense in both money and convenience.

For example Apple used to have such a reputation for quality that the apple tax was something people gladly paid. They still do, but around 2007 this was even more obvious. Remember cut and paste on the iPhone, Apple's reputation for quality was such that millions of customers happily waited for basic functionality. Any other company would have had to rush out cut and paste, but Apple could take their time and get it right.

I don't think there is anything similar in journalism. No one says to themselves "That looks like a good story, but I'll just wait a few days and read about it in the New York Times." We can blame the consumer's impatience, but I think we should blame journalists for not cultivating such a reputation for quality.

It would be really hard and probably lose money for years, but I want to see a paper try that approach. Have an explicit and well know strategy of ,"we aren't going to be first with any stories, but everything you read here is well researched almost certainly true". It would take some time but just imagine what a paper with that kind of reputation could accomplish and the sort of loyalty it could have from customers.

Tempest1981• 10 years ago

Agreed. Savvy consumers prefer quality, but many just prefer entertainment. And entertainment drives clicks/views, bringing more revenue.

Is capitalism supposed to provide some sort of self-correction?

crdoconnor• 10 years ago

It is a race to the bottom as long as we value speed over quality. It is a shame too because I think consumers would really prefer quality over speed for software and news

They do but quality is expensive to produce and consumers can't always recognize it consistently.

Broken_Hippo• 10 years ago

I agree that none of the pay walled papers are good enough to justify the expense. But this was happening pre-internet as well. I used to buy newspapers occasionally when dining out alone. At best, they were somewhat cumbersome to read and provided possibly half a meal's worth of reading mildly interesting stories (to put it mildly. Newspaper subscriptions were never worth it - and this feeling hasn't changed since they went online. The future of journalism worries me a bit since the current model seems to be failing. Folks need consistently reputable sources to get news about events without a monetary barrier to read it. Otherwise, we wind up with folks believing the "truth" in what seems no better than a supermarket tabloid.

greatingale• 10 years ago

No one says to themselves "That looks like a good story, but I'll just wait a few days and read about it in the New York Times."

I absolutely do. NYT isn't perfect, but all my other feeds are so full of junk I do wait to see what the NYT will write about it. You don't even have to wait a few days. The NYT is very good at covering developing stories online with reasonable accuracy.

Symmetry• 10 years ago

You're basically describing The Economist here. Go find their coverage of some topic you know well. It might be shallow, it might emphasize the wrong things, but it will very seldom be out and out wrong. I'm not aware of any non-specialist publication I can say that for.

And instead of just "Principle A said 'aaa', principle B said 'bbb'" coverage of foreign events they also provide a bit of historical context of who these people are and what they've been doing. Along with some editorial about who they think is write which I don't always agree with but which is usually understandable at least.

J_Darnley• 10 years ago

Block all ads and (try to) burn the whole fetid industry to the ground.

lern_too_spel2• 10 years ago

I specifically block ads on clickbait news sites. It would be great if somebody maintained a blocklist that awarded good reporting.

eggy2• 10 years ago

Not an ad-lover or marketer here, but even in the pre-internet days, ads were how you found out about things you might be interested in buying, an information source, sure, to be taken with a grain of salt. But still I bet if you really trace a purchase, even if a friend told you, he most likely saw an ad or a product-based article for selling.

In some cases the ads have been put into the articles themselves, like all of the wooing over the latest Apple products release every 6 months or so. It is driven by the techno-lust for the product. It seems to be, since I have many colleagues who own two or more systems, not including phones and tablets, when one would do. Just look at some sigs in game or tech developer forums where people list their arsenal.

CM30• 10 years ago

I know what you mean.

But I think in part it's just because things don't stay 'in focus' for very long any more. In the news world, one or two days is now all it takes for stuff to be seen as 'old hat', with the timing going down to maybe about two or three hours in the gaming world.

So for journalists, it's more profitable/attention grabbing to get anything out 'right now' that it is to do the research and delay the piece.

It might also be because the first news site to post about something interesting can often claim to be the 'source', even if they're really just writing about something that's already been posted elsewhere. Most journalists don't actually check for the original page or paper, they just reference the site they heard it discussed on.

So being quick can also get a bunch of equally rushed sites linking back to your work as if it was the original source. That can be awfully good for your page rank or whatever...

Either way, it's almost always better (for the journalist/news site/media source) to be the first to print something than to cover it most accurately. That's just how the increasingly quick news cycle works online.

superuser22• 10 years ago

Newspapers used to have a robust QA mechanism: the profession of copy editing. Wasn't perfect, but they knew generally what they were doing. (My dad used to be one).

Guess who goes first in the layoffs.

Any discussion of the state of modern journalism has to acknowledge that newspapers are hemorrhaging cash and lashing out with desperate, short-term plays to try to keep breathing until next quarter.

In your software development analogy - they are perpetually out of runway and trying to cut the burn rate to make it just a little further before they have to send the rest of the staff home for the last time.

Look at what headcount at your local paper has done since the mid-90s. It's really not surprising QA has gone out the window.

lostlogin5• 10 years ago

It hasn't quite died yet. The sites cited aren't on my list sources and for a good reason. The places I go aren't perfect but they are a hell of a lot better than The Daily Mail.

yk• 10 years ago

I think it is more complicated than that, newspapers have the problem that they are hemorrhaging cash, but also that the format of a newspaper article is not well suited to convey information. It is just long enough to give the impression of information, but too short to actually establish an argument. And third, especially on QA, the best newspapers get beaten by the best blogs, it is just something fundamentally different if Bruce Schneier writes about crypto, or if someone who aced his math lecture during undergrad studies writes about crypto.

cookiecaper2• 10 years ago

The industry becomes debased as advertisement becomes its exclusive revenue source. In the old days, newspapers had income from a) subscription fees; b) classified sections; and c) commercial advertisers. This diversification allowed the papers to prioritize the interests of the subscribers, who were paying real money to the paper because they relied on it to have accurate and timely content.

In a world where commercial advertisers are the only source of income (because no one will pay subscription fees anymore, and classified sections are obsolete), it's all about viewership, all about eyeballs. You get eyeballs by making outrageous claims and exaggerations (and engaging in other methods to exploit the subconscious processes of the human mind). You can then return to your advertisers and say "Look, I got 20k pageviews for that article yesterday, and all 20k saw your ad. Keep paying and I can make it happen again tomorrow."

For this reason, highly-polarizing or controversial pieces are extremely common. The media outlets have profit incentive to get two or more large groups at each others' throats, because it means each party is watching their content more often and more intently, which means when a disaster primarily of their own making occurs, they can go back to advertisers and say "We had a record month in June!", excluding the further explanation "because so many people died in violent ways, occasionally because of the false information we reported to get more viewers".

We have to make it so that viewership stops being the most important thing. People are too easy to exploit and hijack for the most-viewed to be a good source. Most often, the most heavily viewed articles will be extremely controversial and will get tons of people who agree coming to bask in the glory of self-congratulation and tons who almost-violently disagree coming to pick apart the arguments and seek ammunition for counterpoints. Both sides see ads when they do this, which means more revenue for the publisher, which means more incentive to produce divisive content.

We need to find a way to fix the perverse incentives in media. As long as its eyeballs-first, it's going to be a circus, because circuses draw attention.

thefastlane• 10 years ago

best not to rely on the media to provide us executive summaries of academic papers. just go read the paper itself (DOI is 10.1111/add.13477). it's a very useful read for getting up to speed on where we are in terms of understanding cancer and alcohol.

Hello71• 10 years ago

Amusingly, this article misspells the name of the author of the referenced article several times as "Conner" instead of "Connor", implying that the writers were in a rush to get it out the door.

sigdoubt• 10 years ago

Was anyone able to parse this paragraph? I keep getting stuck on the contradiction. Which is mildly hilarious in an article about articles being misinterpreted.

She goes on, however, to knock back links suggesting that drinking may lower a person's risks of cardiovascular disease (CVD), noting that people who drink moderately also tend to have other lifestyle factors that lower their disease risk. Or, put another way, she noted that “in a large US survey in 2005, 27 of 30 CVD risk factors were shown to be more prevalent in abstainers than moderate drinkers.”

deadhand• 10 years ago

Do you mean in reference to "knock back"? I think its supposed to be knock back like one would with a beer - as in, consume readily - rather than knock back as in knock away or disregard.

lostlogin5• 10 years ago

The data showing that moderate drinkers had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease was flawed. In the study the abstainers had more CVD risk factors than the drinkers, making any comparisons that were made invalid.

known• 10 years ago

What does alcohol do to your body and brain? http://qz.com/696693/what-does-alcohol-actually-do-to-your-b...

nezt• 10 years ago

Here's a study correlating ethanol usage with a lower risk of lymphoma: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22465910

Here's one correlating ethanol usage with a lower risk of kidney cancer: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049576/

Here's a study linking ethanol consumption with a reduced risk of ALS: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22791740

And it's not just one study linking ethanol to a lower risk of CVD-- it's several. The story is the same for all cause mortality. Acetaldehyde doesn't fully explain elevated risks of throat and mouth cancer, in my opinion... Acetaldehyde is a downstream metabolite, whereas the epithelium of the mouth and throat are tissues that ethanol is clearly coming in direct contact with. Again, this is just a crude hypothesis.

Sure ethanol is a toxin, but attempting to avoid it in an attempt to avoid toxins or carcinogens is a fantasy. Carcinogens are everywhere -- you breath them, eat them, ingest them, absorb them constantly. This is why low/moderate exposure to sunlight, alcohol, certain phytochemicals might actually be 'hormetic'.

I'm not saying that in an era of biotechnology and whole genome sequencing, ethanol consumption will be optimal. When we reach that point, we will most likely be consuming some kind of nutrient gel that contains everything the body needs. We will likely inhabit carcinogen free environments. Until that point, and I say this to all my fellow autistic nerds and hacker news readers, it's probably better to go have a drink or two with that cute girl who sits a few cubes down. If you want to extend life, invest/educate yourself on emerging biotechnologies. Otherwise you'll need to start worrying about the carcinogenic materials your electronics occasionally off-gas. Or the PCBs in your wild caught salmon. Or the benzaldehyde. Or the arsenic in your brown rice. Or the pesticide residues in your clothing. Or the ... nevermind.

Journalists confused an opinion piece for an alcohol-cancer study

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