Category: nutrition

We are pleased to present an excerpt from The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing by Amy Koerber, Jesse C. Starkey, Karin Ardon-Dryer, R. Glenn Cummins, Lyombe Eko, and Kerk F. Kee, published by Open Book Publishers, October 2023. 

In 2015, Johannes Bohannon, along with three coauthors, published an article titled ‘Chocolate with High Cocoa Content as a Weight Loss Accelerator’ in the International Archives of Medicine. The article reported results from a study that divided participants into three groups, with a different diet assigned to each group, and concluded that ‘Subjects of the chocolate intervention group experienced the easiest and most successful weight loss’ (p. 1).

In a personal account published later, journalist John Bohannon described the article as an intentional hoax that he and his coauthors had carried out in response to a request from a German film crew who was making a documentary on the ‘junk-science diet industry.’ To implement the hoax, Bohannon and his coauthors created an ‘Institute of Diet and Health’ that existed only as a website, and he assumed the name ‘Johannes Bohannon’ as lead author of the study. As he explained, the research reported in the article was actually conducted, but it was “terrible science,” including major flaws that would have been detected if the article had undergone a legitimate peer-review process.

Bohannon and his colleagues’ ‘Chocolate with High Cocoa Content’ article was retracted shortly after it was published, and the editors of International Archives of Medicine published a retraction notice dated 10 June 2015 (Editorial Office 2015). The editors’ decision to retract this article ostensibly served to correct the scientific record and prevent the erroneous data reported in the published study from being circulated in subsequent literature. This manner of correcting the scientific record is an important purpose of retractions, as defined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):

Continue reading A closer look at the ‘chocolate with high cocoa content’ hoax

Six months after we reported that journals had slapped expressions of concern on more than three dozen papers by a group of nutrition researchers in Iran, the retractions have started to trickle in. 

But the clock started nearly two years ago, after data sleuths presented journals with questions about the findings in roughly 170 papers by the authors. So far we’ve seen only six retractions, from two journals, of the suspect papers. As one of the sleuths said, “yep, pretty slow.”

Central to the case is Zatollah Asemi, of the Department of Nutrition at Kashan University of Medical Sciences. As we wrote last November: 

Continue reading “Yep, pretty slow”: Nutrition researchers lose six papers

A group of researchers from Iran, Italy and the UK have retracted two meta-analyses on supplements and high blood pressure after making what a statistics expert calls a common error.

Both papers were originally published in the Journal of Human Hypertension. Here’s the retraction notice for “Elevated blood pressure reduction after α-lipoic acid supplementation: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials:”

Continue reading Authors retract two studies on high blood pressure and supplements after realizing they’d made a common error

The work of David Allison and his colleagues may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers. Allison was the researcher — then at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, now at Indiana University — who led an effort to correct the nutrition literature a few years ago. He and his colleagues are back, this time with what might be called the “Regression to the Mean Project,” an attempt to fix a problem that seems to vex many clinical trials. You may have noticed some items in Weekend Reads about letters to the editor that mention the issue. Here, Allison explains.

•Retraction Watch (RW): First, what is “regression to the mean,” and what does it mean for clinical studies? Continue reading The “regression to the mean project:” What researchers should know about a mistake many make