25 Percent of Health Messages in Spanish Text Books Are Unscientific

Most school text books in Spain contain messages about health, but 24.6% of these are not based on any scientific evidence, according to a study."We analysed a total of 844 health messages in primary and secondary school text books in order to identify the level of scientific evidence underpinning these texts, and we classified them into three categories – messages with a high, medium or low level of evidence, messages with an unknown level of evidence, and messages with no known evidence", Inés María Barrio Cantalejo, a researcher at Baza Hospital and the lead author of this study published in the journal BMC Public Health, tells SINC. 

The research team compiled the information between 1 March 2006 and 1 June 2007 based on text books being used at the time in the city of Granada. Texts written in languages other than Spanish, "teachers' guides", and books not containing any health-related messages were discounted."We drew up a table to classify the messages and we recorded the data about the year and subject matter of the text book.
We identified 237 books and we manually reviewed 129 that met the previously-stated requirements. Lastly, we used 80 as a sample", explains Barrio Cantalejo. Out of all the books in the sample, 73.7% (59 books) were aimed at primary school level and contained 548 messages. The average number of messages per book was 10.6, with the highest levels of health-related content being found in books for the third year of secondary education (37%), and in terms of subject matter in Biology and Geology books (32.5%).