The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists – 1 Questions

This is an extract from the second of two BBC radio 4 programmes in which Dr Ben Goldacre investigated the science behind nutritional therapy and the claims made by some of its leading practitioners.
Good diet is important for health, but he wondered if today’s popular, media-friendly lifestyle nutritionists are in fact selling something different: attractive, individualised, over-complicated solutions that sound plausible but in reality are underpinned by little or no scientific evidence.

The programme is challenging, and is delivered really fast. This exercise requires you to listen to the conversation and pick out salient⁺ details.

1 Who wants to be healthy?
2 Who normally promotes a rather simple argument concerning risk-factors for ill-health?
3 What four recommendations for improving ill-health are usually given?
4 Where is the MRC’s** Human Nutrition Research Unit based?
5 What does Dr Jebb say complex advice about health and food can make healthy eating seem like ……..?
6 What were we were still discovering less than a century ago?
7 What three colours are mention in connection with research findings?
8 What does Professor Sir Ian Chalmers say studies can prove?
9 In what ways were anti-oxidant pills thought to be valuable for some time?
10 What was the name of the book written by Dr Spock, a famous paediatrican?
11 Dr Spock recommended putting babies on their stomachs (tummies) to sleep, rather than on their backs, as had been the custom. He quotes an estimate of the number of cot deaths which are considered to have resulted from this. What is this estimate?
12 There are 6 ways in which we might be misled, that are mentioned.
a) What are the first three ways in which we might be misled?
b) And then the second three ways?

*the author of the long-running Bad Science column in the Guardian newspaper
⁺ salient – adj – most noticeable or important
**The MRC = the Medical Research Council

This programme was first broadcast on Radio 4 Mon 31 Mar – 20:00. To hear more, click here

Answers to the exercise above