How the media shapes your thinking -- part two

If you think this article is just about your choice of liberal or conservative media, you need to continue reading. There are no politics involved ... at least not directly.

Last year, while confined to my sister's sofa due to illness, I did something I haven't done in years. I watched daytime television. She has some kind of basic satellite connection that offers a "rerun" station. That is, it takes current-running shows and repeats their older airings. Since I was not feeling well, I decided to watch reruns of a show called The Doctors. From what I've read, this is a very popular TV show but if you don't know anything about it, here's a summary: A team of medical doctors discuss various medical issues, problems, and solutions.

In this particular episode, the panel did a take on a recent study which (they said) indicated that diet soda is actually good for you. They went on to explain the study was commissioned by Coca Cola. 

Now you can probably tell where this is going. A study on diet drinks by a diet drink giant is not going to say anything bad about its products, right? And you can probably expect that these doctors would not only bring that up, but also would have substantial evidence to discredit this "study."

Guess again. Yes, they pooh-poohed the study, and did not offer rebuttal evidence ... but they did something even more interesting. One of the doctors recommended you take two plants, give one of them water for a week and one of them diet cola for a week and see what happens.

For now, we have to surmise that the cola-laden plant will do poorly but it would probably do just as poorly if you decided to use MILK instead of diet cola. Milk? Wait a minute. Is that not the drink that makes a body good? What will it do for the plant? I'm not going to try either experiment but I am going to wonder why the doctors did not explain that this study, like the study that "proves" milk was good for you back in the 30s or 40s was funded by -- drum roll, please -- the dairy industry.

I am not saying the panel was wrong or right. I'm saying they do the public an injustice by not explaining exactly how the conclusions were arrived at ... exactly who was studied, for how long, and what are the comparitive results. They might also point out how other industries finance studies that we not only accept as true and correct, but also live by. (By the way, milk does not make my body good ...) Or, at the very least they could have quoted the study completely because I cannot find anywhere that the study concluded that diet soda is better for you than water.

Here is the summary of the abstract (from https://www.sweeteners.org/category/21/article/71/does-low-energy-sweetener-consumption-affect-energy-intake-and-body-weight-a-systematic-review-including-meta-analyses-of-the-evidence-from-human-and-animal-studies):

“We found a considerable weight of evidence in favour of consumption of low energy sweeteners (LES) in place of sugar as helpful in reducing relative energy intake and body weight, with no evidence from the many acute and sustained intervention studies in humans that low energy sweeteners increase energy intake. Importantly, the effects of LES-sweetened beverages on body weight also appear neutral relative to water, or even beneficial in some contexts.”

It's nice that these professionals took a document and interpreted it for their viewers ... but how accurate was their interpretation ... or more importantly, do we need someone else to explain a document?

Here's my take for the doctors: Go ahead and report on this stuff if you think it is important for your audience to know ... but report on it completely with the traditional who, what, where, when, and why.... then interject your opinion and state it as opinion.

You decide.