August 29, 2012

Ignore the headline, read the story

Stuff has an example of the recurring problem of an perfectly good medical science story spoiled by not one, but two appalling headlines.

Currently, on the ‘Wellbeing’ section of the website you see

Feeling poorly? Try Vegemite

and on clicking through to the story

Vegemite may ward off superbugs

The story then goes on to say that high concentrations of niacin, a vitamin found in many foods, including, yes, Vegemite, has been found in test-tube and mouse studies to help in killing bacteria.  It then says

But consuming jars of the popular yeast extract before your next hospital visit isn’t the answer to warding off potentially deadly staph infections.

Researchers said their results were achieved by administering megadoses of nicotinamide, more commonly known as niacin or vitamin B3, far beyond what any normal diet would provide.

So, in fact, the health advice in the headlines is completely unsupported by the story.

The Herald also reported this story, but their headline is

Vegemite ingredient can kill superbug – study

which is not ideal but at least isn’t downright untrue.  Interestingly, the Stuff page title (which shows up truncated in your browser tabs), is similar: Vegemite Ingredient May Be Key To Superbug Fight.

The fixation on Vegemite is interesting, since in fact Marmite has rather more niacin per gram (6.4mg/4g vs 5.8mg/5g), and quite a few foods including chicken, tuna, and peanuts have more niacin per typical serving.

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »