soft-drinks ate my dna

The credibility of The Independent's science reporting dips even lower today, with a scaremongering headline report claiming that a soft-drinks preservative, sodium benzoate, "has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA." It's awful journalism that jumps to conclusions based on scarce or even non-existent research.

The only research cited is a laboratory test into the impact of sodium benzoate on the DNA of yeast; it's certainly not research that has established any evidence of human impact. However, the Indepedent jumps straight to the idea that the DNA-munching qualities of drinks with sodium benzoate "can eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's."

There's no evidence for that, either.

Given the terrific lack of evidence, the Independent instead focusses on the well-know link between certain additives and hyperactive disorders in children - hoping that no-one notices that this has absolutely nothing to with the claim that drinking soft-drinks containing sodium benzoate "switches off" important parts of human DNA, leading to disease.

In fact, if you wade through columns and columns of irrelevant red-herrings, you get this non-statement:

[Professor Piper] stressed that he was not saying that sodium benzoate was unsafe, but that the food industry could not state with certainty that it was safe.

Isn't it funny how saying that something is not unsafe becomes the headline "Caution: Some soft drinks may seriously harm your health"?

The problem here, of course, is that an honest scientist would have great difficulties saying that something is safe with total certainty - he or she would say it was safe based on the research that was available.

It's that little loop-hole of scientific integrity which allows crack-pots and consumer journalists to then shout "Ah, so you're saying it might give us cancer after all?" Well, no. Just because something is possible doesn't also make it likely.

The Independent's "Consumer Affairs Correspondent" Martin Hickman is either stupid or playing stupid - refusing to distinguish between a thing that is theoretically possible (but has no evidence to support it) and a thing that evidence has suggested is likely.

Instead, Hickman pulls the Melanie Phillips manouevre and assumes that because something is possible, it's almost certainly inevitable - taking an absence of information and assuming the worst, even though there's little or no support for that worst outcome.

It's fucking terrible journalism.