New data has surprising results

Today the news is that salt is okay and yesterday it was that BMI was not a good measure of health. The eagerness to make news sometimes gets in the way of being informative. One day’s science news is trumped (does that have new meaning today?) by the next day’s new discovery. Typically the data are described, the findings are made into pronouncements, and the need for further research is discussed. The reader is left wondering which facts were correct. Is it any surprise that consumers are confused by and distrusting of science? When information is presented in a way that is unclear people just keep doing what they are most familiar with and ignore the information generated by the new finding. We need to make science relevant to the people we are trying to reach.