Tracey Brown worries about a trend
 
Last year, a lot of my post began ‘How could you!’: ‘How can you live with future generations suffering [obesity, chemical sensitivity, alcoholism] because of your foolish comments?’
The complaint was that I had asked chemical scientists to publicise their criticisms of ‘detox’ diets as we headed into yet another season of expensive but pointless New Year rituals. It was an opportunity to address mounting misconceptions about how our bodies function (they can be flushed of fats, like a drain; Christmas eating overburdens us with ‘toxins’, and so on). Scientists’ views of this detox fad – that it has no scientific rationale – were missing. They had become used to garbled pseudo¬science in the lifestyle industry and made few moves to challenge it. The outraged reaction when they did has highlighted a strange tension about giving the public ‘the facts’.
Those who complained objected not so much to the facts, but to scientists publicising them. The head of a health store conceded that there was a lot of nonsense in the claims on remedies but, he argued, their broader message of getting people to focus on their health could only be A Good Thing.

In a good cause

This response was hard to dismiss. It fits with an attitude creeping through health promotion and other policy areas, where the subtleties of evidence apparently get in the way of policy aims. With contentious stories of children over eating, warnings about passive smoking, recycling targets that take no account of energy use and questionable dossiers on WMD, a growing range of officials and advocates invite us to endorse exaggerated public ‘messages’ about the evidence or overlook holes because, surely, we approve of the outcome?
Under this pressure, anyone who questions the evidence risks being accused of endorsing an opposite view, wanting people to be exposed to smoke, get fat, create landfill problems… or endure dictatorships! At the very least, insisting on the evidence is often dismissed as scientific pedantry or deemed ‘unhelpful’.
In 2005, the health writer Oliver Gillie published a critical review of the government-sponsored Sunsmart scheme (a campaign to prevent skin cancer through over exposure to the sun). Sun exposure converts cholesterol into Vitamin D, which our bodies then store. To get the requisite 90 per cent from sun exposure, Gillie argued, people in the UK need more exposure, not less. He was not surprised that this elicited strong reactions. What did surprise him was being accused not of a wrong calculation, but of ‘irresponsibility’ in raising it. 

The head of a health store conceded that there was a lot of nonsense in the claims on remedies but, he argued, their broader message could only be A Good Thing

Not quite Plato

Viewed ungenerously, the desire to maintain policy messages against further evidence sounds like a conspiracy of the enlightened: ‘We know it’s not that simple, but let’s not confuse the plebs’ – a modern incarnation of Plato’s Noble Lie. Unlike Plato’s Republic, however, which was to depend on a coherently constructed myth to hold society together, our noble lies are emerging accidentally through initiatives to improve our attitudes and behaviour – in health, environment, education and security. ‘Evidence-based’ policies in these areas seem to be generated without much regard for the stability or extent of the data, perhaps because the need for action seems self-evident at that moment.
Maybe I’m being unfair. Public health advice, in particular, shouldn’t always change from one research finding to the next. As parents will testify, we can end up in an interminable ping-pong of studies: nursery school makes children aggressive/ helps children to be social and confident; television overstimulates children/makes them fat/is a social tool. 

Anyone who questions the evidence risks being accused of endorsing an opposite view, wanting people to be exposed to smoke, get fat, create landfill problems or endure dictatorship

But having launched a policy initiative, what do you do about material that is now off-message? Accuse it of being unhelpful? The physicist Robert Park argued that this can set you on ‘the road from foolishness to fraud’. The road is travelled further when people who draw attention to misleading claims are berated for not playing along to get the ‘right’ social outcome.

Good faith

It’s sometimes a tough call. But truth is the standard in scientific discourse and, surely, truth must also be the standard in public life. As the science writer Norman Levitt asks, restating Sophocles, ‘Does truth have an absolute right to be heard and understood as such, even at the cost of social peace?’ He says it does.
Not only is there a duty to behave in good faith, but to challenge and debunk. Only in this way can we stop society creating easy pickings for cranks, and have any basis on which to object to cynically selected information, whether in product marketing or the justification for war.

Tracey Brown is the Director of Sense About Science.