Testing Fake News

Originally Posted June 1, 2017

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Along the lines of fake news… I noticed a Facebook add for an article today, “The Boiled Egg Diet – Lose 24 Pounds in Just 2 Weeks”. Opening it, The first paragraph, three sentences in length, is completely claims. The first of these claims made me question the article, and I scrolled straight to the bottom to find some references…

There were none.

An article full of clickbait that is encouraging health changes within people and spitting off facts, and they have ZERO referencing. Every sentence is questionable.

“Many health experts claim that the boiled egg diet will help you burn up to 24 pounds in just two weeks.”

Who are the health experts? How did they come to this conclusion and what data did they use? What was the methodology of their experiment to achieve this conclusion?

Are these questions most people don’t ask? Are there actually people out there that believe the random articles on Facebook, and risk their health to lose those few pounds, with complete faith that it’s proven by ‘health experts’ that could be anyone? They never specificied what they considered a ‘health expert’ to be. It’s not as if we can use the references to see for ourselves. There aren’t any.

So, I decided to take this random article and test it for myself.

First Step – Check the Facts:

Boiled egg diet will help you burn up to 24 pounds in two weeks.

10.8862 kg is 24 pounds, in case you’re like me and work in kilos.

This information is backed up by other websites, like this one, and this one, and this one, but issues appear when the sources of those websites are traced back… The first website, lists one source only, and when clicking on this source, an error occurs and the source doesn’t exist.

The second article contains no sources, and it was upon reading this article that I noticed a pattern. None of them had authors! They are simply written by ‘admin’, which could be anyone. There isn’t even a way to ensure the authors themselves are real people!

Finally, the third one has an author. Carol Luther. I went to click the seemingly hyperlinked, bright orange author name to get some more information on her… it’s not a link. It does nothing. Just a couple of words in orange. Even though your cursor will morph as you hover over the words, don’t get excited, because that’s all it does. No way to research the author, or trace her back to other works. The words do go a pretty blue if you highlight them for copy and paste, though.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of Carol Luther’s in the word, as my google search lead me to believe. There’s no possible way to know which one wrote this article, what she wanted or achieved from writing this article, or even if a Carol Luther really did write the article at all.

And again, no references.

So, with none of the related websites holding any sources or information to actually check the data with, I had to go digging myself. Looking through past papers, I found everything from the effect of feeding copepods algal based diets right through to excluding eggs from diets in younger children. The closest actual study I found was comparing the protein requirements in healthy, adult males when eating either a mixed traditional chinese diet or the egg diet. And I’m not sure I understood the intricacies of the results in the short abstract, but it didn’t tell much about the egg diet anyway, unless you’re focusing solely on it’s effect on protein requirements, and not weight loss.

So, this fact will be listed as UNABLE TO PROVE.

Plumpness is one of the biggest health problems in the US.

Definition of Plumpness: the quality of having a full rounded shape, a persons quality for being rather fat; chubbiness.

Define Plumpness in Health Terms: … I actually found nothing, other than the word plumpness being used to describe the shape of lips after a particular injection (ouch). I don’t think plumpness is an accurate descriptor when used in a health and wellbeing context. Yet, they’ve used it. Perhaps it was used to avoid words like ‘obesity’ which affects less people than those that simply refer to themselves as ‘plump’, and therefore encompassing a larger audience to ‘need’ this diet, even though they won’t all be included in the statistic.

When searching “major health problems in the US” the first result is a list of health problems associated with excess body weight, and many of the various articles consider obesity as a primary concern in the US. Some of these articles contain no sources themselves, and come from the same ‘iffy’ websites as the Egg Diet ones above.

So, this fact will be listed as VERIFIED, based simply on it being more of an opinion than a fact, and the surplus of sources, even ‘iffy’ ones, that support the claim.

Obesity is linked with heightened risks of diseases (cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and several cancer types).

In a study by King Sun Leong and John P. Wilding on ‘Obesity and diabetes’ in Best Practive & Research Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (Vol 13 (2) in July 1999), obesity is closely correlated with the prevalance of dibetes AND cardiovascular disease. In another review by Kathleen Y. Wolin, Kenneth Carson, and Graham A. Colditz on “Obesity and Cancer” in The Oncologist (Vol 15 (6) in June 2010), weight related problems can account for 20% of cancer cases. Evidence is supplied based on the types of cancer (and is properly referenced).

As such, this fact will be VERIFIED.

But, for now, until I can edit this, that’s all I’ll have done. Apologies, and sorry if I don’t get around to adding to it!! Contact me if I take to long 🙂