There’s already enough bogus nutrition information going around as is.
The British Medical Journal is taking some heat from 183 distinguished and outraged scientists. The BMJ published a nutrition investigation of the 2015 US dietary guidelines report, but the investigation is chock-full of inaccuracies and misleading statements.
Just last week (November 5), the angry scientists sent a letter to the BMJ outlining all of the problems with the faulty investigation, claiming it was "so riddled with errors" that it has "no place in the pages of a prominent scientific journal." Among the scientists who signed the letter is Walter Willet, the chair of Harvard's Department of Nutrition, along with Richard Decklebaum, the director of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University.
SEE ALSO: 8 Widespread Nutrition Myths: Debunked by Science
The US government publishes an updated set of dietary guidelines every five years, so the report has an impact on how companies label food, what students eat in school, and what will be the focus of future nutrition research. But back in September, the BMJ published an investigation written by Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, which refutes many of the statements made in the report. The only problem is that a number of her claims seem to be wildly false and ungrounded.
Since the nutrition world is already overflowing with false information and misconceptions, the last thing we need is more conflicting scientific reports about what’s healthy and what’s not. In Teicholz’s investigation, she claims that the scientists behind the US dietary report “abandoned established methods” for most of their analyses, and that they’d “deleted meat” from their list of recommended foods. But was that true? Not even close.
In fact, the letter crafted by the angry scientists lays out a number of errors made by Teicholz, saying that her “investigation” was based on “non-facts.” They advise the BMJ to retract her work, not only to provide readers with the facts, but to protect the journal’s own credibility.
"A number of scientists have told me that it's mind-boggling that the BMJ would publish this article critiquing a report by a panel by well-respected scientists without even asking the panel to respond," Bonnie Liebman, the director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the torchbearer in the effort to get the paper retracted, told The Verge.
So far, the BMJ has only made one retraction of Teicholz’s claims — her incorrect statement that an authoritative scientific review failed to find a link between saturated fats and heart disease, when it, in fact, did. While it’s certainly rare for the credibility of a distinguished medical journal to be questioned, it serves as another reminder to cast a skeptical eye on all information circulating around the net.
It will be interesting to see how the case continues to unfold, and how Teicholz and the BMJ will react to the scientists’ carefully crafted breakdown of all the investigation’s inaccuracies — you can read their retraction request here.
