Frequent tropes of health and science news

Like other genres and sub-genres, health and science news has standard tropes that are used by journalists and expected by audiences. These can have an impact on the accuracy and reliability of coverage. As one science journalist says:

Remember, newspapers are about trying to make a story; they are not presenting results from a science study. They are writing a story about a science study and trying to get you to read it and trying to get you interested in it.[1]

Hyperbole

Journalists often use hyperbolic terms such as "breakthrough," "revolutionary," "life-changing," "game-changing," "landmark," "miracle" or "Holy Grail" to describe new research findings. News outlets may overuse these descriptors, which seldom apply to the research featured in their coverage, leading to an exaggeration of the study’s novelty or importance.[2] News stories are also often based on a single finding or study, without including broader context.[3]

Incongruent images

Images used in news stories may tell a different story than the text. For instance, during heatwaves, many visuals frame heatwaves as ‘fun in the sun,’ which undercuts the seriousness of global warming.[4] Similarly, graphic visualizations may be misleading if they exclude certain data or frame it to make small changes or differences seem more extreme, while audiences base their trust of visualizations largely on how visually attractive they are.[5]

Misleading risk reporting

Audiences can get a misleading sense of risk from how statistics are reported. For example, reporting that a drug raises the risk of a problem by "up to 20 percent" (relative risk) is more sensational than reporting that the risk increases from 85 percent to 87 percent (absolute risk).[6] Even representing something as a risk can be misleading, when there isn’t a strong reason to think there is a causal relationship. Eating ice cream is associated with shark attacks, because both are more likely to happen in summer, but there’s no reason to think that eating ice cream increases your risk of being attacked by a shark.

When reading statistics in a news story, two questions are often helpful:

• “Is that a lot?” Health news is often covered in terms of how much a factor changes the rate of something, but that may not mean much if the overall level is low. A 2025 study, for example, found that participants who avoided ultraprocessed foods lost twice as much weight than those who ate those foods. That sounds like a lot, but in absolute terms the difference was just two pounds.[7] While coverage of the study in outlets like CNN[8] and The New York Times[9] did include the absolute number in the body of each story, the headlines both focused on the relative results.
• “Compared to what?” How well a new medical treatment works should be explained not just in comparison to a placebo or no treatment, but to the best currently available treatment.

Simplified headlines

Even when the actual story is accurate, headlines often focus on the most sensational part of the story – and leave out important context such as whether research was done on humans or animals and whether there’s evidence to suggest causation and not just correlation.[10] A study showing an association between nuts and weight loss, for instance, may get the headline Nuts may make you lose weight, study finds rather than the more accurate Nuts linked to weight loss.

Superfoods

Nutrition coverage tends to focus on the purported benefits (or, less often, harms) of specific foods, rather than contextualizing them as part of a healthful diet: "Lack of context in nutrition stories also contributes to miscommunication to and confusion in the public... media rarely explain how a single study fits into the larger body of evidence or its real-world implications."[11] It also doesn’t usually contextualize stories in terms of other nutrition research, which can lead to the perception that “nutrition scientists keep changing their minds" rather than building consensus.[12]

[1] Jarman, R., & Mcclune, B. (2010). Developing students’ ability to engage critically with science in the news: Identifying elements of the ‘media awareness’ dimension. The Curriculum Journal, 21(1), 47-64. doi:10.1080/09585170903558380

[2] Ordway, D-M. (2021) How to avoid bad headlines on stories about health and medical research. NiemanLab.

[3] Treharne, T., & Papanikitas, A. (2020). Defining and detecting fake news in health and medicine reporting. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 113(8), 302-305.

[4] O'Neill, S., Hayes, S., Strauß, N., Doutreix, M. N., Steentjes, K., Ettinger, J., ... & Painter, J. (2022). Visual portrayals of fun in the sun misrepresent heatwave risks in European newspapers.

[5] Lin, C., & Thornton, M. A. (2021). Fooled by beautiful data: Visualization aesthetics bias trust in science, news, and social media.

[6] Treharne, T., & Papanikitas, A. (2020). Defining and detecting fake news in health and medicine reporting. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 113(8), 302-305.

[7] Dicken, S. J., Jassil, F. C., Brown, A., Kalis, M., Stanley, C., Ranson, C., ... & Batterham, R. L. (2025). Ultraprocessed or minimally processed diets following healthy dietary guidelines on weight and cardiometabolic health: a randomized, crossover trial. Nature Medicine, 1-12.

[8] LaMotte, S. (2025) Eating minimally processed meals doubles weight loss even when ultraprocessed foods are healthy, study finds. CNN

[9] Callahan, A. (2025) Avoiding Ultraprocessed Foods Might Double Weight Loss. The New York Times.

[10] Ordway, D-M. (2021) How to avoid bad headlines on stories about health and medical research. NiemanLab.

[11] Miller, G. D., Cohen, N. L., Fulgoni, V. L., Heymsfield, S. B., & Wellman, N. S. (2006). From nutrition scientist to nutrition communicator: why you should take the leap1, 2. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 83(6), 1272-1275.

[12] Nagler, R. H. (2014). Adverse outcomes associated with media exposure to contradictory nutrition messages. Journal of health communication, 19(1), 24-40.