Well I'm back after three weeks off writing, you know, science. It's nice to see from the stats that a core audience have remained loyal enough to keep reading while I've been away - so I'd like to give a shout out to Stuart "Core Audience" Walton. Anyway, I'll be blogging properly later on a variety of subjects, but on seeing the BBC News website this morning I felt obliged to comment.

The story in question is under the headline "Chocolate 'may cut diabetes risk'". When I clicked the link, I assumed this would be a report on a recent study that linked chocolate with cutting the risk of diabetes.

Erm, no.

On seeing that the first line starts with "Scientists are to investigate..." I thought that perhaps this would be a report on how a study is about to be started to investigate whether chocolate might cut the risk of developing diabetes.

Erm, no.

In fact the first paragraph reads: "Scientists are to investigate whether eating chocolate can reduce the risk of heart disease in women with diabetes."

So the BBC are reporting on a study that hasn't even been bloody done, and are trailing it under a headline that suggests chocolate might prevent diabetes, when the study doesn't even ask that. It's bad enough that their science editor has taken leave of their senses, but you have to question the credibility of the University of East Anglia team, and particularly their leader Professor Aedin Cassidy. What kind of person publishes their work in the media before they've done it? Particularly using phrases like "if the trial confirms the hypothesis".

A bit of googling though brings up a cosy little connection. Cassidy has past experience with the BBC, consulting on their "Inside Out" series - you can see her
here giving her "expert" opinion "that Craig's limited diet" - consisting exclusively of jam sandwiches - "will prove detrimental to his health".

So basically the lesson is that if you're friends with the BBC, you don't have to wait for those pesky lab results to get your research into print. Brilliant.

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P.S. Comments are temporarily disabled while I sort out a technical problem.