A 20% increase in cancer risk sounds scary, right? Better say bye bye bacon.
But wait!
The incidence of bowel cancer in the United Kingdom, where the Cancer Council study was done, is 70 per hundred thousand. That's 0.07%.
A 20% increase takes this to 84 per hundred thousand, 0.084%.
The increase in risk is 14 per hundred thousand or 0.014%. (And that's the worst case).
Do you feel endangered by a risk that has increased by zero point zero one four percent?
You are twelve times more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than by that extra rasher of bacon. Logically you should as well take one twelfth the number of car trips, as to forego that extra rasher.
I read somewhere recently that scientists are "really bad at statistics".
I dunno. In this case I suspect the folks at the Cancer Council are deliberately spinning the scariest reading of the results, never mind that they're deeply duplicitous and misleading.
To them, getting people to eat less processed meat is worth the hoodwinking.
