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BY STANLEY FELDMAN

AND VINCENT MARKS

We are bombarded with advice on healthy living. If everyone agreed upon a particular formula that would ensure good health and long life we would all sign up for it. Unfortunately, there is no utopian life plan and little unanimity of opinion. As a result we do not know whose opinion to follow and whose to ignore. As a prelude to assessing the value of all this advice, we must consider whose views are sensible and reliable. Whose opinion can we trust?

Frederick II of Germany wrote in the thirteenth century: ‘one ought not to believe anything, save that which can be proven by nature and the force of reason’. His views were echoed in the sixteenth century by the French essayist Montaigne: ‘I would have every man write of that which he knows.’ The implication was that one must distinguish between opinion, which is that which one thinks may be true, and fact. Only fact is a fit basis for promulgating new ideas. The basis of essay writing is to use observed fact as a springboard from which to launch opinion. The word itself comes from the French verb essayer, to test or try; and it was the essay form that Montaigne used as a means of trying out his own ideas.

Today, it is all too common to find would-be Montaignes starting with an opinion and using it as though it were fact. This leaves us with the difficult problem of separating reliable, objective fact from opinion. If two people present diverging views on a subject, whom should one trust? Which one is presenting fact and which opinion?

This should be a relatively simple exercise, but, because of sophistry, spin and the deliberate misinterpretation of information, it has become increasing difficult to distinguish true facts from the plethora of dubious opinions with which we are constantly bombarded. Fact is verifiable information, numbers or observations, spontaneous or experimental, that can be reliably reproduced, and is compatible with the existing web of knowledge. Unfortunately, the misinformation explosion has swamped factual stories. The improbable sells more newspapers than the probable. The more times an improbable, unsupported story is reported, the more it enters into the folklore of what ‘everybody knows’.

Ask anyone how many people died in the Chernobyl disaster and the response is likely to be that ‘everyone knows’ it was hundreds or thousands. We have been deliberately led to believe this story by those opposed to nuclear energy. In fact the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported in 2003 that there were fewer than 40 deaths in the 20 years following the disaster. Although there was a significant increase in the number of cases of cancer of the thyroid, there was not any increase noticed in the incidence of leukaemia or birth defects.

Who is going to give us accurate, unbiased information that we can trust? We should be able to trust various governmental bodies and independent broadcasters such as the BBC. Unfortunately, even these usually reliable bodies fall into the misinformation trap. The BBC, the government, its Chief Medical Officer and the Food Standards Agency, to take some examples, may not set out to be partisan or to push deliberate falsehoods, but the information presented, even by these authoritative bodies, is subject to the bias of the presenter and his or her particular interpretation of information. The result is that too often opinion becomes presented as fact.

There seems to be a mistaken belief within the BBC that equal weight must be given to both sides of a problem. The author Douglas Adams put it succinctly when he wrote, ‘All opinions are not equal. Some are a great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.’ The concept that fair play demands that all opinions be treated equally is nonsense. But today we frequently see warriors against reason paraded as heroes on the BBC, representing this or that irrational pressure group. The BBC gives them credibility. Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour recently gave air time to an advocate of coffee enemas who claimed it had cured his cancer. They failed to explain why taking coffee by this somewhat curious route should be better than taking it by mouth. By giving this contributor the same opportunity as an expert, to present a totally ludicrous opinion on the air, the BBC implied that his views have the same legitimacy as those of an informed spokesperson on the subject. The BBC bestows an undeserved and inappropriate authority on the advocates of silly therapies, unproven diets and irrational scare stories. Their ideas gain an undeserved credence as a result of the media obsession with providing a ‘balanced debate’.

The government warning against eating too much salt sits uneasily with its own advice to replace both the water and salt lost in hot weather, and also with the statement in its own briefing document, published by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) in 2004, that the ‘Intersalt study (1997), the largest ever carried out, found no correlation between salt intake and blood pressure’.

The report of the Parliamentary Select Committee in 2004, as reported by the BBC, stated that obesity has increased 400 per cent in 25 years – when international agreement on the interpretation of the measurement of obesity by the body-mass index (BMI), was established only about fifteen years ago. Before that time the very different, Metropolitan Life Insurance tables were used as an index of obesity.

The Food Standards Agency, usually a source of reliable information, has become a political, pioneering body that believes children will not get fat if vending machines sell fruit juice and milk rather than cola, despite the fact that fruit juice contains slightly more calories. A recent pronouncement that as a result of the epidemic of obesity the present generation will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents is silly specious propaganda: how can one know the life expectancy of a generation until most of them have died?