ABSTRACT
News media coverage of vitamin E can affect perceptions of this essential oil-soluble nutrient; not just by the public, but also within the scientic community. Critical analysis combined with the ability to repeat experiments ultimately will triumph in leading to an enhanced scientic understanding, but “media myths” often are self-referential and scarcely dented by subsequent study results. And, even if science is self-correcting in the long run … that, of course, is the rub-in the long run. In the short term, hope, hype and experimental science all compete to dene a topic, with accuracy often suffering. Science is not practiced in isolation from society. This fact is abundantly clear in the controversy currently raging over vitamin E. Unconscious biases and the multiplication of variables challenge the designers of review articles such as meta-analyses, the conclusions of which frequently and irrationally get touted as overturning all previous scientic studies, especially if an unexpected conclusion emerges.
