My education in the rhetoric of press relations continues. On February 8, the BioMed Central Press Office sent out an email to registered readers with the Subject line “Chocoholic mice fear no pain”. On February 9, a press release under the same title appeared on Eureka Science News wire, which began
Ever get a buzz from eating chocolate? A study published in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience has shown that chocolate-craving mice are ready to tolerate electric shocks to get their fix.
A quick glance of the study in question (Emanuele Claudio Latagliata et al., “Food seeking in spite of harmful consequences is under prefrontal cortical noradrenergic control“, BMC Neuroscience, provisional publication date 8 February 2010) is enough to show that it’s not about “chocolate-craving mice” but rather about the effects on mice of “exposure to a food restriction experience”.
Basically, mice like chocolate, but if you give them electric shocks when they try to get at it, their “chocolate-seeking behavior” is “suppressed”, i.e. they tend to learn not to enter a section of their cage (the “chocolate-chamber”) where the chocolate can be found, instead spending more time in the “empty-safe chamber”. However, if you first starve them a bit (by subjecting them to a “moderate food-restriction schedule” adjusted to cause a loss of 15% of body weight over five days, and then give them two days of ad libitum feeding to cancel acute nutritional deficits), the electric shocks are less effective at suppressing their chocolate-seeking behavior.
Thus the control-group mice and the food-restricted mice have exactly the same experience of chocolate, and exactly the same innate taste for it. The FR group is not so much “chocolate-craving” as “food-craving”. Rather than “chocolate-craving mice are ready to tolerate electric shocks to get their fix”, a more accurate description would be “mice who have been starved are more willing to ignore possible electric shocks to get at food”. (The real — and I think important — scientific interest of the article is in the “prefontal cortical noradrenergic” part, but never mind that.)
There are two strokes of public-relations genius here. One is the experimenters’ choice of chocolate as the food to try to condition mice not to seek. Chocolate-seeking is surely much easier to sell to readers (and thus to editors) than Purina-Mouse-Chow-seeking. The second clever move is the PR choice to spin this as being about addiction to chocolate rather than about reaction to enforced dieting.
I wasn’t the only one to notice these rhetorical choices — see Jessica Palmer, “Cocoa Madness: aberrant chocolate-seeking mice run rampant!“, Bioephermera, 2/8/2010.
Anyhow, it seems to be working. Current headlines and ledes via Google News include “Mice Endure Electrical Shocks for Chocolate” (“Is chocolate as addictive as heroin? Possibly.”); “Chocoholic mice really crave chocolate” (“Italian scientists say they’ve showed chocolate-craving mice so desire chocolate, they will tolerate electric shocks to pursue the food.”); and so on.
And responding to a request for jokes from readers in the NYT, Paul Seaburn of Spring, Tex., sent in this one:
Scientists in Italy have developed a strain of chocolate-craving mice that love chocolate so much, they will tolerate electric shocks to pursue the food. They’re called female mice.
I was happy to see that one news agency, ANI, seems to have discarded the suggested spin in favor of something much closer to the truth, but still likely to interest the public: “Going on a diet can trigger lifetime of overeating” (“A study has found that going on a diet could trigger a lifetime of overeating and even cause changes to the brain.”)
The “lifetime of overeating” is a bit of a stretch, given that the mice were just two days removed from their “food-restriction schedule”); and it always amuses me to see people so impressed by the idea that behavioral changes might be associated with “changes in the brain” (as opposed to changes in the soul, I guess); but still, this is pretty good.