Eating Oatmeal Probably Won’t Extend Your Life

A hilarious tale of bad science reporting.

Is the breakfast food somewhere in this picture? Read on to find out! Photo by Rachel Park on Unsplash

In over a decade of writing, I’ve covered an abundance of bad science in the media. When you’re looking at scientific reporting, there are just so many ways that media organizations can mess up even the most basic of science. Sometimes it’s through incompetence, sometimes perverse incentives, and occasionally malice, but whatever the reason I thought I’d seen everything that could go wrong in a scientific story.

I was wrong. A new Fox News story has screwed up science in perhaps the most hilarious way I’ve ever seen.

The story in question is a fairly simple piece of reporting. The headline is “Eating this breakfast food could help you live longer, study suggests”, which sounds like it follows the general theme of scientific reporting. It’s a standard way to introduce everything from awful review papers to solid randomized trials, because it’s a grabby title but vague enough to mean anything.

But almost immediately, the piece gets confusing. The first paragraph is just a vague non-quote from UC Davis, the university, about how eating breakfast may be good for your health. The piece then goes into quotes from two health professionals — a medical doctor and a dietitian — about how oatmeal is mostly good for your health…