A Tutorial on How to Evaluation Health Information on the Internet.

View the above tutorial by MedLine Plus on how to evaluate health information. Adobe Flash Player is needed. If you have been involved in the health, fitness and nutrition industry you have probably been caught off-guard once or twice by mainstream articles on the latest health and fitness findings. Just last summer it happened to me. A student asked, "did you see the article in the New York Times showing that there is no benefit in reducing sodium intake?" That article proclaimed No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet (Kolata 2013.) Even more shocking was the headline that was brought to my attention published in the UK online daily, The Independent that blared, Recipe for a Long Life: Overweight People Have LOWER Death Risk (Laurance 2013).

The frustrating thing about these headlines is that they are not true. The quasi sodium study was done on a very small population who were trying to cut their sodium intake to extremely low levels (well below 1500 mg). Will readers only see the title and decide they can have unlimited sodium in their diet? ....probably so. It is clear that the majority of Americans are getting far more than 2300 mg sodium per day and exceeding this levels has been found to correspond with certain disease factors.

The same was true of the article on overweight and longevity; in a few credible studies, a slight decline in mortality was noted for individuals with a body mass index in the 25-30 range (slightly overweight), compared with those of normal weight or underweight. But with the headline of "Recipe for a Long Life: Overweight People Have LOWER Death Risk", what is the take-away message to the obese population? It's ok to be overweight, eat what you want and not exercise?

The heart of the problem is that magazine and newspaper companies want to sell magazines and newspapers - and people want to hear what they want to hear. An attention-grabbing headline that tells someone who is laboring to lose weight that he/she might as well not bother.

Use these points (and those in the MedLine Plus tutorial) to assess research.

Consider the source. Is the publication generally regarded as reputable? Does it derive any portion of its income from the promotion or advertisement of products or substances similar to those tested in the study?
Who did the research. Were the scientists working for a nonprofit organization, a university or another third party organization, or was the study done by an industry with something to gain or lose, depending on the outcome of the research?
Who funded the research? This is critical to find out - who is the sponsor. View this video clip at nutritionfacts.org or on YouTube below. In this case, the research was funded by the beef industry. http://nutritionfacts.org/video/bold-indeed-beef-lowers-cholesterol/#.UyI9KTi3L3s.email
Evaluate the scientific procedures involved. Was this a randomized study with good controls? Was is a meta-analysis? How large was the sample size? Was the study conducted on humans or on lab animals? All of these factors can affect the validity of the study.

Are there other sources that support these findings? If this is the first study to show these findings, and especially if the sample size was small or lab animals were used rather than humans, it is probably too early to get excited about the findings one way to the other.