If trust makes the world go 'round, why does the world look so flat?

摘要

It has been something of an axiom in nutrition science that confusing communications result in confused consumers. Recently, several organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, have drawn attention to erroneous, miscommunicated, irreproducible, or outright fraudulent scientific studies in the biomedical area and have raised the twin issues of trust and credibility in science and science communications. In this article, the authors describe and explore the ramifications of trust issues in the current nutrition and biomedical science environment. They offer perspective on how these issues may be impacted by the evolving communications environment and they review some modest proposals for enhancing nutrition and other science credibility and hence public trust and understanding.