The news media can be so hungry for new discoveries that some ideas are already “understood” by journalists before they can be fully tested in the laboratory. Or, due to a lack of in-depth knowledge of science, some journalists may misunderstand complex scientific principles. Frankly, even scientists themselves sometimes get so excited about their own discoveries that they reveal them to the media before other scientists can rigorously verify them. The result is that the public is presented with the latest discovery, which has not been fully confirmed for once. So, when these hypotheses are subsequently tested, consumers feel fooled by what should be a normal scientific process. “The Consumer Corner will give you some tips on how to judge such news stories. People who make decisions based on a single study usually do so on impulse, not on a scientific mind. Real scientists are good at observing new trends, evaluating the methods used in various studies, looking at each finding in light of all the evidence summarized in other experiments, and gradually revising their understanding of the facts. As the scientific evidence accumulates, scientists become more confident in their ability to make a recommendation for people’s health and lives. A single study may be interesting, even exciting, but experienced researchers do not jump to conclusions until such findings have been replicated and confirmed. Even for real, repeatedly tested findings, media sensationalism sometimes leads to an overestimation of their importance. For example, a few years ago the media enthusiastically reported that oat bran had the ability to lower blood cholesterol, a lipid that indicates a risk of heart disease. Although the reports were true, oat bran is only one of hundreds of factors that affect blood cholesterol. Rarely do these reports mention that reducing saturated fat intake is still the primary method of lowering blood cholesterol. And, new findings need to be refined. It is true that oat bran can lower blood cholesterol, but how much should a person take in a day to achieve efficacy? Can it be made into small pills or powders to meet the need? Will oat bran crackers work? If so, how many crackers should I eat? Does everyone react the same way to oat bran? To what extent can oat bran compensate for the irregularities in the daily diet? One scholar who has studied this states, “To get the equivalent of a bowl of oatmeal for oat fiber, one needs to eat 90 cookies.” It takes a bowl and a half of oatmeal a day to have an effect on blood lipids, and a few cookies certainly do not provide enough of the ingredients, and certainly do not compensate for the damage caused by a high-fat diet. Now that the cholesterol-lowering effects of oat bran have been confirmed, food package labels are now able to claim that eating more oats can reduce the risk of heart disease. The entire process of discovering, questioning and confirming this fact has been studied for almost a decade, while confirming some other effects has taken much longer. In science, individual discoveries do not have a decisive impact on our human knowledge as a whole, but they are like each frame of a movie that plays a role in the whole movie, and there are still too many frames to be added to complete our “movie”.