Here's a quick and nice set of checklists for evidence detection for popular health stories

Ben Goldacre writes (In:

A nice stab at building a low threshold crowd-sourced health news rating site

bengoldacre - secondary blog )

Here's a nice stab at building a low-threshold crowd-sourced health news rating site:

http://simplystatistics.tumblr.com/post/15669033251/healthnewsrater

If just a few extra pieces of information were reported in science stories about the news, it would be much easier to evaluate whether the cancer risk was serious enough to shut down our Facebook accounts. In particular we thought any news story should report:

1. A link back to the original research article where the study (or studies) being described was published. Not just a link to another news story. 
2. A description of the study design (was it a randomized clinical trial? a cohort study? 3 mice in a lab experiment?)
3. Who funded the study - if a study involving cancer risk was sponsored by a tobacco company, that might say something about the results.
4. Potential financial incentives of the authors - if the study is reporting a new drug and the authors work for a drug company, that might say something about the study too. 
5. The sample size - many health studies are based on a very small sample size, only 10 or 20 people in a lab. Results from these studies are much weaker than results obtained from a large study of thousands of people. 
6. The organism - Many health science news reports are based on studies performed in lab animals and may not translate to human health. For example, here is a report with the headline “Alzheimers may be transmissible, study suggests”. But if you read the story, scientists injected Alzheimer’s afflicted brain tissue from humans into mice. 

So we created a citizen-science website for evaluating health news reporting called HealthNewsRater. It was built by Andrew Jaffe and Jeff Leek, with Andrew doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.  We would like you to help us collect data on the quality of health news reporting. When you read a health news story on the Nature website, at nytimes.com, or on a blog, we’d like you to take a second to report on the news. Just determine whether the 6 pieces of information above are reported and input the data at HealthNewsRater.

I agree.  This goes right along the principles of information diet that encourages people to think critically about information that you obtain on a daily basis. Perhaps other checklists based on study biases will be built on as time goes, but for now, this is  a great checklist.