The news media are hungry for new findings, and reporters often latch onto ideas from the scientific laboratories before they have been fully tested. Also, a reporter who lacks a strong understanding of science may misunderstand or misreport complex scientific principles. To tell the truth, sometimes scientists also get excited about their findings, and leak them to the press before they have been through a rigorous review by the scientists' peers. As a result, the public is often exposed to late-breaking nutrition news stories before the findings are fully confirmed. Then, when the hypothesis being tested fails to hold up to a later challenge, consumers feel betrayed by what is simply the normal course of science at work. Sometimes media sensationalism overrates the importance of even true, replicated findings. For example, the media eagerly report that oat products lower blood cholesterol, a lipid indicative of heart disease risk. Although the reports are true, they often fail to mention that eating a nutritious diet that is low in certain fats is still the major step toward lowering blood cholesterol. Today, oat bran's cholesterol-lowering effect is established, and labels on food packages can proclaim that a diet high in oats may reduce the risk of heart disease. The whole process of discovery, challenge, and vindication took almost 10 years of research. Some other lines of research have taken much longer. In science, a single finding almost never makes a crucial difference to our knowledge as a whole, but like each individual frame in a movie, it contributes a little to the big picture. Many such frames are needed to tell the whole story.