Blog for all health-conscious: Fooducate Blog - Resveratrol Health Benefits Relied on Faked Data

Monday, 16 January 2012

Fooducate Blog - Resveratrol Health Benefits Relied on Faked Data

Resveratrol Health Benefits Relied on Faked Data

Posted: 16 Jan 2012 04:25 AM PST

Red wine aficionados take note: The health benefits of antioxidant resveratrol may have been exaggerated or outright falsified. A researcher from the University of Connecticut played around with data in 145 different studies over the course of seven years, in order to make the chemical compound, derived from the skins of grapes, appear more beneficial to our health than it really is.

There’s a danger in academic research that tends to create a bias towards the results hypothesized by the researcher:

“If you are blatantly honest about your failures, you will get nowhere…The fact is that reviewing agencies want success. Therefore you spin your data in the most favorable way. That's where the dangers begin to come – that you spin it a little more than you can justify and then one thing leads to another. It's a very mushy, very fuzzy line.” Read more from the Los Angeles Times….

Now guess what happens to bias when research is funded by a food company interested in specific outcomes. Even if the company does not explicitly say what the expected results are, there is a certain pressure to please. For example, most research done on aspartame over the course of its existence was funded by companies with financial interest in its success as an artificial sweetener.

Nutrition science is complicated. It is so hard to isolate a specific nutrient and see how it affects metabolism, weight loss, or disease control. Designing research that accounts for hundreds of variables and still yields trustworthy results is a difficult task.

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