Is there a conspiracy out there to make parents feel guilty? Don’t answer that. Just consider a recent item on UrbanBaby.com, the website that fancies itself a guide for parents in the know. “If you went to college,’’ it read, “will your daughter develop an eating disorder?’’
Seriously? Seriously. The post summarized a Swedish study of 13,000 women born between 1952 and 1989, and offered these useful facts: Girls were twice as likely to develop eating disorders if their mothers went to college, and six times more likely if their maternal grandmothers went to college. Girls who had high grades were at especially high risk. The researchers figured that girls were reacting to pressure to achieve. And the subtext was clear: Sorry, smart ladies, you messed up again!
This is, mind you, the same UrbanBaby that issued an apology in June for a post titled “Does Breastfeeding Cause Autism?’’ It was about another study, by a California neuroscientist, that examined toxins in the breastmilk of rats. The study contained a host of caveats (such as: People are different from rats). The brief UrbanBaby post did not, raising the ire of breastfeeding and autism-awareness activists - two groups that one should think twice before crossing.
I haven’t heard a similar hue and cry from college-educated women this week, but I figure most have the criticial thinking skills to dismiss the eating-disorder study out of hand. Then again, you never know; there’s nothing more distracting than a little bit of information, confidently reported and totally incomplete. The Internet is a chief abettor; UrbanBaby is hardly the only website that lives or dies on traffic, and generates buzz with fear mongering headlines.
And the Web is not the only place where studies are oversimplified and amplified beyond reason. Take the furor over BPA in baby bottles, which implies maximum guilt with minimal room for action. I’m glad I can buy my 10-month-old bottles and cups that are BPA-free, but what can I do about my 5-year-old, whom I might - or might not - have unwittingly poisoned for years?
Besides, news reports about studies don’t always look critically enough at the studies themselves. About a year ago, TV networks and newspapers breathlessly reported a study from Cornell University that suggested a link between autism and rainfall. Because autism rates were higher in rainy Pacific Coast counties, researchers hypothesized that being cooped up inside - watching too much TV or getting too little vitamin D - could trigger autism in kids at risk. A few months later, the website Scienceline.org took a close look at the study and suggested a less-dire interpretation: Maybe rainy urban areas do a better job of reporting autism cases than rural, dry ones.
Epidemiological studies are conducted in the real world, not a carefully controlled lab, so they’re often open to misinterpretation, says my old friend Dr. Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health, who edited the Reuters story about the eating-disorders study.
UrbanBaby, to its credit, did link to the Reuters piece. But the website didn’t mention the caveats that Reuters pointed out: That the vast majority of kids with college-educated mothers didn’t have eating disorders, and that the study - unlike the UrbanBaby headline - didn’t imply any cause and effect.
Joyce Slaton, the UrbanBaby editor who wrote the post, told me she was confident her educated readers could figure out those details on their own. “These are people who are fully capable of clicking on a link and sussing out for themselves whether a story is relevant to them,’’ Slaton said by phone. “If you’re going to be a consumer of information on the Interent, you’d better figure out how to filter what’s something that’s important to you and what you can ignore.’’
Still, there’s something to be said for headline-writing care, and for editorial judgment. I asked Oransky whether a study that doesn’t conclude much at all was worth reporting in the first place. He argued that it’s worthwhile to identify a group of girls who might be at risk.
“This doesn’t mean don’t go for education,’’ he told me. “It doesn’t mean get adopted by a family that doesn’t go to college. It doesn’t mean do badly in school. . . . What it means is, if you’re lucky and you’re in a family that has lots of education, and your daughter is doing well, keep an eye out. Don’t obsess about it, because the risk is still quite small, but keep an eye out for it.’’
It’s useful information, when you put it that way. But it’s sure hard to sum up in a few incendiary words.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 
