Diet headlines sell newspapers and magazines; because of that diet and nutrition articles are everywhere in media coverage.  This is information that the American public needs.  But BEWARE!  You can’t always believe what you read.  Because health information is so good at selling publications, reporters grab any new study for material but very frequently do not report the results accurately, nor do they put the study results in proper context.  This is such an insidious problem that groups like the American Dietetics Association have developed programs to foster more responsible health reporting.

Here’s a recent example.   A study was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that among breast cancer survivors a diet high in fruits and vegetables and low in fat did not reduce cancer re-occurrence in the next seven years that they followed these patients.  One headline based on this study in a regional online newsletter was “Fruit Does Not Reduce Cancer Risk.”  What???  The study wasn’t just on fruit it was on total fruit and vegetable intake combined with low fat diet.  But the most important factor to realize in this study was that it was a study done on cancer survivors, people who have already had cancer.

Because these study subjects already had cancer, we know they probably have had serious factors in their life that led to their high-risk status to begin with; for instance they may have used hormone replacement therapy or have very dense breast tissue both of which greatly increase breast cancer risk.  In addition, cancer treatment itself raises risk of future cancers.   So when we are studying a group of women who already had breast cancer we are studying an already high-risk group.  The report should be – in a very high-risk group of people, fruits and vegetables and low fat diet don’t seem to be enough to prevent cancer re-occurrence.