"316 by The Association of Tea Marketing)”. The most important rule to remember is : don’t automatically believe the headline. It is there to draw you into buying the paper and reading the story. Would you read an article called, “Coffee pretty unlikely to cause cancer, but you never know”? Probably not. To avoid spraying your newspaper with coffee in the future, you need to analyze the article to see what it says about the research it is reporting on. Consider the following questions to help you figure out which articles you’re going to believe and which you’re not. Does the article su pport its claims with scientific research? Your first concern should be the research behind the news article. If an article touts a treatment or some aspect of your lifestyle that is supposed to prevent or cause a disease, but doesn’t give any information about the scientific research behind it, then treat it with a lot of caution. The same applies to research that has yet to be published. Is the article based on a conference abstract? Another area for caution is if the news article is based on a conferenc e abstract. Research presented at conferences is often at a preliminary stage and usually hasn’t been scrutinized by experts in the field. Also, conference abstracts rarely provide full details about methods, making it difficult to judge how well the resea rch was conducted. For these reasons, articles based on conference abstracts should be no cause for alarm. Don’t panic or rush off to your doctor. Was the research in humans? Quite often, the “miracle cure” in the headline turns out to have only been test ed on cells in the laboratory or on animals. These stories are regularly accompanied by pictures of humans, which creates the illusion that the miracle cure came from human studies. Studies in cells and animals are crucial first steps and should not be und ervalued. However, many drugs that show promising results in cells in laboratories don’t work in animals, and many drugs that show promising results in animals don’t work in humans. If you read a headline about a drug or food “curing” rats, there is a chan ce it might cure humans in the future, but unfortunately a larger chance that it won’t. So there is no need to start eating large amounts of the “wonder food” featured in the article. How many people did the research study include? In general, the larger a study the more you can trust its results. Small studies may miss important differences because they lack statistical “power”, and are also more susceptible to finding things (including things that are wrong) purely by chance. You can visualize this by t hinking about tossing a coin. We know that if we toss a coin the chance of getting a head is the same as that of getting a tail – 50/50. However, if we didn’t know this and we tossed a coin four times and got three heads and one tail, we might conclude tha t getting heads was more likely than tails. But this chance finding would be wrong. If we tossed the coin 500 times - i.e. gave the experiment more \"power\" - we'd be"