Earlier this year, Dr. Johannes Bohannon and a team of German scientists revealed a study that said people on low-carbohydrate diets could lose weight faster if they ate a bar of chocolate every day.
News organizations, especially in Europe but also in the United States, ran with the story until it was revealed to be a deliberate hoax - to find out whether scientists and reporters could detect junk science. They couldn't and didn't.
With the help of a German television reporter, Bohannon went further, creating a fake organization, the Institute of Diet and Health, contacting test subjects, performing experiments and writing news releases. In doing so, he intentionally falsified some data and left out crucial details in the news release. Again, no one questioned it.
"There are smart people out there who are getting fooled by this stuff because they think scientists know what they're doing," he told the Washington Examiner.
The public may not trust the media, but they revere the words of scientists.
What have you heard or read recently that politically motivated or supported scientists want you to believe?
Climate change? Foods that shouldn't be eaten? Vaccinations that cause autism?
Steve Milloy, founder of Junkscience.com, listed in the Examiner several now debunked reportings - cholesterol being a dietary evil, dietary fiber preventing colon cancer and electric power lines causing cancer - that fooled scientists and the media.
Today, it's the supposed vanishing of honeybees, attributed to three products in a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. In 2013, the European Commission voted to ban the products but now, thanks to what is thought to be a badly misreported assessment of the risk of the chemicals - it is considering whether to scrap the ban. The problem is, the number of hives in Europe is increasing, and the number of bees lost annually is unchanged, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.
In the United States, honeybees in general and the number of honey-producing hives specifically, are increasing, according to the Department of Agriculture.
The lack of truth in some junk science is no reason to throw out all science, of course. But the scientific community overall - and the media in its reporting - should be wary of individual studies or research that threaten dire consequences without testing the experiments, checking the transparency, asking the right questions and, in general, being skeptical.
After all, that what scientists used to do.