Ben Goldacre Quotes

• “You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me - I would go so far as to say that it's my favourite leisure activity,”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is sponsored by Coca-Cola.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong, but you'll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “You will do it because you know that knowledge is beautiful, and because if only a hundred people share your passion, that is enough.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody [..] how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “I'd like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that 'Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.' What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out off my arsehole instead?
  
  Thank you. Anton.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected—not to mention true—that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “Nutritionists don't stop there, because they can't: they have to manufacture complication, to justify the existence of their profession. These new nutritionists have a major commercial problem with the evidence. There's nothing very professional or proprietary about 'Eat your greens,' so they have had to push things further. But unfortunately for them, the technical, confusing, overcomplicated, tinkering interventions that they promote - the enzymes, the exotic berries - are very frequently not supported by convincing evidence.”

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• “At school you were taught about chemicals in test tubes, equations to describe motion, and maybe something on photosynthesis—about which more later—but in all likelihood you were taught nothing about death, risk, statistics, and the science of what will kill or cure you.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “What can you do? There's the rub. The most important take-home message with diet and health is that anyone who ever expresses anything with certainty is basically wrong, because the evidence for cause and effect in this area is almost always weak and circumstantial, and changing an individual person's diet may not even be where the action is.”

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• “Children can be disgusting, and often they can develop extraordinary talents, but I’m yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage.”

  Ben Goldacre

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• “As it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain. Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.”

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• “[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don’t understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms—its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world—and channeled into infantile fantasies. “Big pharma is evil,” goes the line of reasoning; “therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism.” This is probably not helpful.”

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• “Two large trials of antioxidants were set up after Peto’s paper (which rather gives the lie to nutritionists’ claims that vitamins are never studied because they cannot be patented: in fact there have been a great many such trials, although the food supplement industry, estimated by one report to be worth over $50 billion globally, rarely deigns to fund them). One was in Finland, where 30,000 participants at high risk of lung cancer were recruited, and randomised to receive either ß-carotene, vitamin E, or both, or neither. Not only were there more lung cancers among the people receiving the supposedly protective ß-carotene supplements, compared with placebo, but this vitamin group also had more deaths overall, from both lung cancer and heart disease. The results of the other trial were almost worse. It was called the ‘Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial’, or ‘CARET’, in honour of the high p-carotene content of carrots. It’s interesting to note, while we’re here, that carrots were the source of one of the great disinformation coups of World War II, when the Germans couldn’t understand how our pilots could see their planes coming from huge distances, even in the dark. To stop them trying to work out if we’d invented anything clever like radar (which we had), the British instead started an elaborate and entirely made-up nutritionist rumour. Carotenes in carrots, they explained, are transported to the eye and converted to retinal, which is the molecule that detects light in the eye (this is basically true, and is a plausible mechanism, like those we’ve already dealt with): so, went the story, doubtless with much chortling behind their excellent RAF moustaches, we have been feeding our chaps huge plates of carrots, to jolly good effect. Anyway. Two groups of people at high risk of lung cancer were studied: smokers, and people who had been exposed to asbestos at work. Half were given 3-carotene and vitamin A, while the other half got placebo. Eighteen thousand participants were due to be recruited throughout its course, and the intention was that they would be followed up for an average of six years; but in fact the trial was terminated early, because it was considered unethical to continue it. Why? The people having the antioxidant tablets were 46 per cent more likely to die from lung cancer, and 17 per cent more likely to die of any cause,* than the people taking placebo pills. This is not news, hot off the presses: it happened well over a decade ago.”

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• “We are talking about a programme which claims that ‘processed foods do not contain water’, possibly the single most rapidly falsifiable statement I’ve seen all week. What about soup?”

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• “So what steps can a regulator take when it has established that there is a problem? In very extreme cases it can remove a drug from the market (although in the US, technically drugs usually stay on the market, with the FDA advising against their use). More commonly it will issue a warning to doctors through one of its drug safety updates, a ‘Dear Doctor’ letter, or by changing the ‘label’ (confusingly, in reality, a leaflet) that comes with the drug. Drug-safety updates are sent to most doctors, though it’s not entirely clear whether they are widely read. But, amazingly, when a regulator decides to notify doctors about a side effect, the drug company can contest this, and delay the notice being sent out for months, or even years.”

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• “It is clear from the evidence presented in this book that the pharmaceutical industry does a biased job of disseminating evidence - to be surprised by this would be absurd - whether it is through advertising, drug reps, ghostwriting, hiding data, bribing people, or running educational programmes for doctors.”

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• “There are many ways in which journalists can mislead a reader with science: they can cherry-pick the evidence, or massage the statistics; they can pit hysteria and emotion against cold, bland statements from authority figures.”

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• “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction…”

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