Inflammation and Metabolic Syndrome Lay Article

In the past I had read quite a few lay articles that will highlight basic sciences papers in their article in order to try support or promote a theory or a product. However, I have found that in actuality, these articles end up manipulating the basic science article and do not actually highlight a lot of truth. I found this article Inflammation: The relationship between metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and inflammation and thought that it would be interesting to examine as a class.



First, this is an incredibly short article, in fact it is so short that the content suffers a lot. The introduction is incredibly abrupt and neglects to introduce the topic well. The author does not define key terms very well and I believe that for a person who has little knowledge on this topic, they would be incredibly confused. The tone is often sarcastic and unprofessional with phrases such as "participants let medical folk poke, prod" being used.



Secondly, I don't believe that the topic of this article was ever intended on being addressed. Towards the end of the page under 'What this means to you' the first two sentences state the following, "Somehow the metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and inflammation are probably related. Figuring out how they're related is a whole different problem." I thought that that was supposed to be the topic of the article, and yet apparently it's a whole different problem. I don't believe that the author used the best facts from this basic science article to create an appropriate article. She just tried to summarize the abstract in as little words as possible to let the audience think that she knew something, when in fact it is apparent that she knows very little.



It is clear that the moral of the story is to "have less fat". She provides no dietary or exercise methods that may be helpful, she doesn't provide a very clear explanation as to what individuals should be concerned or who is at high risk. I feel as though this article could have been done well if the author did not decide to write it in 5 minutes. Do you think that this article provided individuals who are not well versed in this field with adequate information on the topic/basic science paper?



Check out the link here: http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/briefs/diabetes_endocrine/hb041116b.htm