How not to be taken for a mug by misleading health stories this New Year

The Christmas/New Year period is always fun for health balls. Because we like drinking lots of wine and eating lots of chocolate around this time of year, newspapers like to pick up on weird little studies which purport to show that those things are good for us, while leaving out inconvenient details, stuff like ‘the study was on some tissue samples in a petri dish’ or ‘the study was on a chemical which exists in wine in trace amounts but we’re pretending it’s about wine in general’ or ‘obviously chocolate isn’t good for you, for God’s sake’. So here are some hints and tips to avoid being taken for a mug.

1) Read the whole story

The master of health-balls debunking, Ben Goldacre, first called attention to the sneaky journalistic trick known as the ‘caveat in paragraph 19’. You write your piece with its big exciting headline (‘Christmas crackers cause haemorrhoids’). You push your exciting reasons for it (‘A new study says that the action of cracker-pulling can lead to herniation of blood vessels around the anus’).