By Syd Baumel

On March 11, 2002, wanting to give Robert Cohen a chance to explain how he arrived at his incredible conclusions about the milk and breast cancer study by Anette Hjartåker and her associates, I emailed him with some key questions and comments. In particular I was after the (to quote Cohen) "population statistics supplied by the authors" upon which Cohen based his most damning criticism that "the authors mis-read [sic] their own data" and that, in actuality:
  Women who drank a lot of milk as children developed more cases of breast cancer than notmilk users. How much more? A factor of 640%! I was by then convinced Cohen was neck deep in dissemblance, that he was caught in a Big Lie and was not about to admit it. But I approached him politely, identifying myself as a journalist and fellow vegan wishing to cover the controversy fairly and accurately. The article, I explained, would be part of a larger report I was writing on the controversy over milk for aquarianonline.com. I noted that I had already corresponded with the Vegan Society’s Stephen Walsh, Ph.D. (author of the highly critical open letter to Cohen that brought the study and its attendant spin to my attention) and with the study’s lead author, Anette Hjartåker, and that I’d read the original paper too. I then quoted the parts of his column that puzzled me and inserted my specific questions.

My entire correspondence with Cohen is reprinted as an appendix to this article. My purpose is to show how Robert Cohen responds to the kind of "rigorous scrutiny" and "peer review" that he claims his writings have consistently withstood – and how willing he really is to "go toe to toe" with people who disagree with or question him. (See Cohen's "True Evil Is Exposed" on this page.)

I know three others who have tried and failed to get this kind of toe time with the Notmilkman: Stephen Walsh, whose attempt is detailed in an article by Jeff Nelson at VegSource and in "Spinning Out of Control," Stephen Kaufman, M.D., who has described his near encounter with Cohen in a letter to VegSource, and VegSource’s vegan founder and president Jeff Nelson, whose invitation to Cohen to provide a side-by-side reply to Walsh’s open letter on VegSource was angrily refused.

Cohen promptly responded to my email, but not in the way I would have liked. Overlooking my few questions and the fact that I had already read the full paper, he said he would be "happy" to "guide" me through this "extremely biased and poorly designed study" – once I’d obtained "an ORIGINAL copy of the study."

"When you are ready to discuss same," Cohen concluded, "call my office at 201-871-5871."

I really didn’t want to interview Robert Cohen. I was struggling to complete and publish the piece by the end of the month, and I groaned at the thought of having to go "toe to toe" over the phone in what I feared would be a rambling, digressive, and likely confusing interview (what if Cohen tried to "guide me" using garbled statistics I could neither understand nor refute?) that I would have to transcribe with my two typing fingers rather than having a focused, reviewable (by others more knowledgeable than myself) answer in my inbox.

I emailed Cohen back, reminding him that I had already read the "ORIGINAL" paper, and . . .
 

Would it be asking too much, as a favour to an overworked writer with a less than iron-clad grasp of Cox proportional hazards regression analyses, if you could just spell out in writing the details of your critique? I have years of experience reviewing medical literature, so if a scientist can understand your critique, so probably can I, with a little homework, perhaps. If not, I'll run it by Walsh, Hjartaker, or some more neutral third party. I suggested we could even open up our correspondence to include Walsh, Hjartåker, and other interested parties – peer reviewers, if you will – like the science mailing list of the International Vegetarian Union (IVU-SCI), Cohen’s own mailing list (I didn’t know at the time that it was a moderator only posting list), and anyone else he might like to invite for the purpose of facilitating an informed review.

Cohen wasn’t interested.

"Yes, it would be a bit too much," he replied in answer to my first request. "I am on the way to Toronto. Packing my van. Sorry you did not take advantage of my phone call offer. Perhaps some other time."

The Notmilkman also poured cold soy milk all over my suggestion about a broader-based correspondence. Refusing to have any contact with Stephen Walsh, he added:

"Judging by the past, I think that you may very well cut and paste my comments together, just as others have done during this recent controversy."

Did he really think there was more danger I would misrepresent his written words – witnessable by anyone of his choosing – than the contents of a private telephone conversation?

Ten days later I decided I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t play along.

"May I call you then to discuss the Hjartaker paper?" I wrote. "I'd like to record the interview for accuracy (as I always do), if you have no objections."

"I look forward to it!" Cohen replied. "Please call Lisa at 201-871-5871. She schedules all interviews for me."

Then he made a surprising request:

"Save me a bit of time please, as I place about four cubic feet of papers into storage each week, and FAX the original Hjartaker study to my office."

Robert Cohen had already stuck "the fraudulent study of the century" – the document responsible for his own "credibility crisis of the century" – where the sun don’t shine?

I continued to play along, at considerable bother faxing a scanned and enlarged copy of the study to Cohen, calling Lisa (whom I later learned is Cohen’s wife) to confirm receipt of a legible fax, and scheduling an interview at the earliest available date, which I was told was nearly a month later, well past the deadline I had now abandoned.

While this was going on, I had emailed Anette Hjartåker to ask if she could provide the person-year data missing from her study. On April 11, she did, and I revised the draft of my article accordingly. Robert Cohen’s accusations now seemed more incredible than ever.

Five days later, I decided to give Cohen a heads up:
 

Hi Robert,

I thought I'd run this by you in advance of our scheduled conversation next Tuesday. It's from a draft of my article-in-progress on the conflict over the Hjartaker study (which I faxed to your office shortly after your last email; your secretary confirmed receipt when we scheduled the interview). This part focuses on the two major areas of disagreement between you and Walsh and Hjartaker. I welcome your comments.

Regards,
Syd Baumel
 

In the excerpt I was openly critical of Cohen, and Cohen immediately faulted me for it:
  That which you have written contains biased language. You wrote:

<<Insinuating shady data manipulation, Cohen wrote>>

Such language not only biases your potential readers, but shows me your intent.

You continue:

<<In answer to Cohen's finger-pointing>>

So, up to this point you have me acting shady, insinuating, and finger pointing. . . .
 

I replied:
  Robert, those judgemental words (far, far less judgemental than your published words with regard to Hjartaker et al.) represent how I regard your position based on my current knowledge. I'd be more than happy to sing your praises instead if our further communications give me sound reasons to. Please remember, this is just a draft of my article. . . .

Again, if you deserve credit for exposing scientific fraud rather
than criticism for an unfounded attack on people conducting proper scientific research, I will very happily report that. Just convince me.
I take my responsibilities as a journalist very seriously.
 

It was the beginning of a fast, furious, and completely futile correspondence – and the end of our scheduled interview. At one point in my draft I had admitted my own initial difficulties in understanding the formula Hjartåker and her associates had used to construct the low, moderate, and high milk intake groups. "It is a bit of a braintwister," I wrote, "which might explain Cohen's incomprehensible interpretation."

"Incomprehensible intermpretation [sic]?" Cohen shot back. "Perhaps we should not do the interview, and have you just write whatver [sic] you will."

I replied:
 

That's entirely up to you if you feel you have nothing more to add
to explain how you arrived at your interpretations, calculations, and conclusions, particularly this one:

. . . the expectatiopn [sic] of breast cancers for low milk consuming
females was 156 cases out of 311. The actual number of cases was only 42.

The expected number of cases of breast cancer for the moderate and high milk consumption group was 155 cases. The actual number of cases of breast cancer for the milk drinkers was 269.

In other words, the authors mis-read [sic] their own data.

Women who drank a lot of milk as children developed more cases of breast cancer than notmilk users. How much more? A factor of 640%!

[ME AGAIN:] Please let me know if you'd still like to speak to me on April 23, as scheduled. Otherwise, I'd be happy to reprint this exchange as an appendix to my article and let readers decide for themselves where the bias lies.
 

Cohen never mentioned the interview again and I was relieved to let it drop; but we exchanged several more emails before I saw no point in replying any further. I was satisfied that I had given him every possible opportunity to, at the very least, provide the data that had led him to claim milk increased breast cancer 640% rather than having reduced it – or to admit he’d gotten it wrong. Instead, Cohen had kept parrying with a riddle that I later learned he also used to fend off Stephen Kaufman:
  In any study, criteria must remain standardized.
Let me ask you this.
In th [sic] AH [Anette Hjartaker] study, please define:

CHILDREN

Low milk consumption - How much?
Medium consumption - How much?
High consumption - How much?

ADULT

Low milk consumption - How much?
Medium consumption - How much?
High consumption - How much?
 

This was, I assumed, Cohen’s way of suggesting that because the questionnaire had not segregated childhood and adulthood milk consumption into "low," "medium," and "high" levels, but rather into a wider range of multiple choice categories, the researchers’ creation of these three new levels for their combined childhood and adulthood milk consumption groups was scientifically illegitimate.

This is the kind of procedure that can allow biased researchers to massage their data. But as I show in "Bias is as Bias Does," Hjartåker et al.’s publication record is inconsistent with a pro-dairy bias. What’s more, not to have created the composite groups would have left unanswered a question that the study’s hard-earned data could help answer: do childhood and adulthood milk consumption – both of which show a statistically nonsignificant trend to be related to premenopausal breast cancer in this cohort of women – bear a statistically significant relationship to breast cancer when combined? For people without bias, all data that addresses this question is a precious commodity, not to be squandered.

Ironically, Robert Cohen himself had found no fault with the use of nonstandardized groups six months earlier when he penned his "fraud of the century" diatribe. The groups were the very basis for his supposed revelation that the study had actually found milk increased breast cancer more than sixfold, not reduced it. Now – for lack of evidence to prove his damning allegation – he was insisting I reject the "biased" procedure upon which he’d based that charge.

Still, I tried to answer Cohen’s objection.

"If you can provide a credible argument as to how this lack of standardization between the multiple choices for childhood and adulthood milk consumption might have introduced significant bias FOR MILK into the study, I'm all ears," I wrote.

But Cohen was not. Instead, he just kept repeating his question to the beat of a steady buildup of taunts and threats.

I tried one last time:
 

Perhaps you're hinting at the question of how to reclassify in an
unbiased way the women into three "low," "moderate," and "high" groups that meaningfully combine their childhood AND adulthood (at entry into the study) milk consumption. Hjartaker et al. chose to do it in a way that strikes me as an elegant solution to the problem. Can you think of any other way(s) that might have yielded a significantly different result, in particular a result that would have been statistically insignificant or significantly AGAINST milk?
But Cohen just kept hammering away with the riddle, a blunt tool to smash the study and save his face. Finally, in the last email to which I was to reply, Cohen wrote:
  Your REFUSAL to answer my repeated request reveals your intentions, Syd.

I suspect that you tried, and in doing so rervealed [sic] the basic flaw of this study.

Now that you are armed with truth, I expect you to write it.

Failure to do so will respond in legal action against you and your journal.

As you know, I have taken a lot of crap, and will accept no more.

Should you wish to continue this discussion, you must first respond to my SIMPLE question.

I suspect that you will not.

If that is the case, you are a pathetic excuse for a journalist.

Robert Cohen
 

"I can't reveal something I don't know and that you refuse to tell me," I answered. "For the last time, explain yourself (as I have), or forever hold your peace (such as it is)."

But Cohen never did. I had challenged him to suggest how another method of slicing and dicing the data could have yielded nonsignificant results – or results suggesting an adverse effect for milk. Hjartåker and her associates had published the raw data he needed in order to do this in Tables I, II, and III of their paper. But he wouldn’t do the math – or had tried and had nothing to show for it. Instead he insisted I do it. The burden of proving his allegation was mine, not his.

"The information you seek is before you," Cohen wrote in his final email, sounding like a guru in meltdown. "Unless you discover the secret, you will not experience truth. Read the AH [Anette Hjartaker] study and fill in the blanks. Your refusal to do so is perplexing."

Not as perplexing as Cohen's refusal to do so. Then I could have spread the revealed truth of Robert Cohen, rather than document his stubborn dissemblance.