Stanford Report, February 22, 2006

Media Monitor

"The food industry did a great job of selling that, and people believed them." —Marcia Stefanick, PhD, professor of medicine, on how people should stop thinking low fat is the same as healthy. She co-directed a study from the federally funded Women's Health Initiative that found that benefits of low-fat diets have been overstated. Newsweek, Feb. 20. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11299429/site/newsweek/

"The field is littered with things that looked incredibly promising but, when exposed to harsh light of clinical trials, failed." —David Magnus, PhD, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, on the difficulty of using early-phase clinical trials to determine whether a treatment really works. San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 12. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/12/MNGD0H7AGT1.DTL&;hw=stanford&sn=013&sc=110

"All of these projects live or die—not so much on ideas—but on people." —Robert Siegel, MD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology, on Stanford students' involvement with Face AIDS, a nonprofit organization that raises money and increases awareness about the African AIDS epidemic. San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 6. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/06/BAGESH3C4G1.DTL&;hw=stanford&sn=018&sc=684