The data game.

• Author: Crossen, Cynthia
• Position: Evaluation of food studies

The year: 2173. Two scientists talk about a man who has just been roused from a 200-year sleep.

"For breakfast, he requested something called wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk."

"Oh, yes, those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties."

"You mean there was no deep fat, no steak or cream pie or hot fudge?"

"Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

"Incredible."

--Woody Allen, Sleeper

People know how to discount some kinds of information. We usually would not take too seriously a claim by the maker of Quick 'n Crispy Crinkle Cut Fries that "In a nationwide taste test, you preferred the crispiness of Quick 'n Crispy Crinkle Cut Fries, 3 to 1." Similarly, when the National Examiner publishes a story saying, "You can slash your cholesterol level [as much as 30 percent], strengthen your heart and add years to your life with a daily can of 7-Up," many people would, rightly, not stop taking their cholesterol medication. We tend to give more weight to surveys, studies, and polls reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, Time, The New York Times, the network news shows, or The Wall Street Journal. Yet even forums like these have been slow to recognize how dubious is much of the research they publish.

People know enough to be suspicious of some numbers in some contexts, but we are at the mercy of others. We have little personal experience or knowledge of the topics of much modern research, and the methodologies are incomprehensibly arcane. Nevertheless, we respect numbers, and we cannot help believing them. Numbers bring a sense of rationality to complex decisions--the ones we used to make with common sense, experience, and intelligence.

Yet more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit, and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause. If the results of the research contradict the sponsor's agenda, they will routinely be suppressed. Researchers have become secretive and their sponsors greedy. The media, which can usually get the raw numbers if they want them, are stingy with data because data are boring, and many journalists are themselves innumerate.

For example: If there were two things about food that we knew for sure, it was that milk was good for children and chocolate was bad. Studies found the opposite. Surely wine, cigarettes, and pate are harmful to your health. Studies have shown the reverse. For years, whole wheat bread was thought to be better than white. No, says a study. Studies found that oat bran was good for the heart, then not good, then good. Apple a day? A study showed apples cause cancer. Hundreds of studies have exonerated coffee; hundreds have damned it.

While most of the financing for food research comes from the government, private interests with financial stake in the outcome of the studies are paying a growing share. State and federal government financing for colleges and universities to do research and development has flattened in recent years, while the amount of financing from industry has increased dramatically. In 1981, industry contributed $292 million to schools for research; by 1991, that figure had jumped to more than $1.2 billion. The theory is that if the companies may profit from the research, and they often do, the companies should pay for it. Many food researchers must choose: research funded by an interested party or no research at all.

However complex and compromised, food research commands an astonishing loyalty from consumers, resulting in alarming shifts of behavior from study to study. A study showing that the pate-consuming French have healthier hearts actually increased sales of the fatty spread in the U.S. While most people would not rush out to take an experimental drug after one small study demonstrated its effectiveness, vast numbers of people will eat or not eat a food based on a single study. That is why studies...