So, I heard a really neat BBC Radio 5 broadcast on one of the newest and most ridiculous health food myths: two British newspapers - the Independent and London Evening Standard - both just put out articles regarding the healing properties of bananas (or "ba-nah-nas," as it's pronounced in the broadcast). Both articles claimed that "scientists" (and you gotta love that generic term!) have shown that bananas are just as, or even more, effective than anti-HIV drugs. The article in the Standard went so far as to say that the chemical in bananas called "banana lectin" could be the key in treating HIV. BAH! Thankfully, the BBC broadcast debunks this tomfoolery.
Professor David Markowitz, whose team conducted the banana-HIV research, was contacted in the broadcast and, as it turns out, the story goes something a bit different in actuality. This research, which was conducted at the University of Michigan, demonstrated that banana lectins might - and that's the key word here - be useful in preventing or reducing the sexual transmission of HIV. Not in treating the disease. And it's the compound in the bananas that's effective, not just the bananas on their own, as it would probably be impossible to get enough BanLecs from the latter option, even if you were to eat a whole truckload of the fruit. However, the damage has already been done, in that those two silly newspapers may have already misled the public considerably.
We often look at bedlam examples of newspapers and other media jumbling up and distorting nutrition and health facts, but quite frankly this is not just a sort of humourous example, but a bit of a frightening one too. That is, it's a real possibility that people with HIV might read this foolish bit of rubbish and think to themselves, "Cool; I guess I can go off my drugs now and just start eating a lot of bananas." And who could really blame someone for wanting to go off their HAART drugs? The regimens are convoluted and a nuisance, and the drugs themselves can have a whole host of side effects, including indigestion, nausea and headaches, or even pancreatitis, renal failure and liver failure. Not to mention, these medications aren't cheap either.
This mistake is sort of ha-ha funny, yes, but it's rather upsetting also. Someone could get seriously hurt. It's not as though your average layperson would read a story like this in the paper and decide to look up the appropriate article in a medical journal to make sure that the p-values were below 0.05, that proper controls were used and that there were enough subjects to constitute a representative sample. People just don't do that. Thus, there could be people out there who have been very misled by this story and who may not have heard that it was in truth garbage afterwards.
But back to the bananas... to read the facts oneself and then to write these kinds of articles is shameful and, I believe, wholly irresponsible of the reporters. Journalists, just like dietitians, social workers and physicians, have an ethical responsibility to transmit correct and valid information to the public. In this instance, such accountability has been completely neglected and the writers' rights to "interpretation" have been horrendously overstepped. For those of us who will become dietitians one day, what are we supposed to tell patients when they try to convince themselves that these ridiculous things the newspapers tell them are indeed correct? And people tend to ignore the facts so that they can continue to believe what they want to believe... so how does one talk them out of it? How do we get people to believe the truth, when it's so much less interesting than the lies?
I seriously think that there ought to be a Hippocratic Oath for reporters. Until then, I can only wonder how the authors of such sloppy journalism can sleep at night.
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