Digging deeper

Cheesy

I hold out hope for good science journalism, although that may be in vain.

The headline: Stinky Cheese makes you live longer (from the LA Weekly). No conditionals, definitive. So, let's dig a little deeper.

The blog post is simply a shortened retelling of an article that appeared in The Telegraph in the UK, titled: The secret to why the French live longer: Roquefort cheese.  The article, by one Andrew Hough (notable for "quirky Internet stories) didn't link to the original paper, although it did name the journal where it was published in: Medical Hypotheses. That should be an immediate alarm bell. It's a journal meant to publish ideas with observational support but little or no experimental evidence. Meaning it's a forum for speculation; the journalists shouldn't be reporting this with a definitive tone. At best, it is correlative, but this particular publication does not even quantitate the correlation. So, it is speculative: basically, the French seem to live longer, and they eat a lot of moldy cheese - could one be causative of the other? That's an old news - no, it's not even news.

Is there a story here, then? Yes - do a search on the author's names: Dr Ivan Petyaev and Dr Yuriy Bashmakov, and we find that they are part of a company: Lycotec, which has a business model making nutraceuticals. And their latest product - something made from fermented cheese. Coincidence? Sad thing is, all they could justify it is a speculative paper in a journal that doesn't require scientific evidence.

The story is in the paper itself: the authors declared no conflict of interest. I think they very much had a conflict of interest in this, that this publication is nothing more than a publicity stunt - and shoddy journalism just pushed it forward.

So, go ahead, enjoy the Roquefort - life may be too short to worry about bad cheese.

PS: Besha Rodell - just a little critical thinking and some internet research would elevate your reporting.  Stop regurgitating pablum.