Tom Chivers

Finally! A health story about cancer that doesn’t resort to hyperbole

The lot of the snarky health-science debunker is not a happy one. It involves going to a lot of newspaper websites actively seeking out stories that will annoy you, and getting annoyed by them, and then writing about how annoyed you are. Look, here’s a piece that claims some food or other makes you live longer, based on how some chemicals responded to some other chemicals in a petri dish. Look, here’s a piece which claims substance X causes cancer in the headline, and then admits in paragraph 19 that it does no such thing. Look, here’s a piece which takes the results of a trial in mice and reports it as though we’re talking about humans.

So, for once, it is nice to be able to show a piece – in a newspaper which is particularly notorious for health bullshit – which actually gets a lot of this stuff right.

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