"LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS"

i feel sorry for people who get sucked in to causes and scams based on misleading information and the misuse of statistics (ie peta, veganism, organic foods, cleanses, most stuff people like which i find stupid or unnecessary). i have taken my share of math and statistics classes and if there is one universal theme that i got from my professors it is to be wary of any one claiming proof through numbers (**correlation =/= causation). as it turns out, the leading cause of motorcycle deaths is simply owning a motorcycle...




today i read an article recommended by a friend. well, a good-intentioned mother of a friend. she is one of the nicest people i know, and yet she regularly gets pulled in to these articles and makes life-changing decisions based on the information they provide. now, i wont bore you with a full review of the article but i will say that as i read it i found it to be nothing more than cleverly worded scare tactics designed to get people to click on their website. it may as well have been national enquirer magazine.




one thing that they consistently did, which really annoyed me, (aside from drawing false conclusions and making bold assumptions and not providing sources for any data and not talking about the actual studies themselves and not discussing the control groups) was use stats to intentionally mislead the reader. for example they said "[eating] one sausage or three pieces of bacon [daily] raises the likelihood of the cancer by 20 percent." a shocking stat to say the least. but this is very misleading. the wording implies that eating these meats increases your chance of getting cancer by a full 20% (meaning if your baseline risk is 10%, then it becomes 30%). but this is not the case. knowing a thing or two about stats would tell me that it is a 20% increase on the original percentage (meaning if your baseline risk is 10%, then it becomes 12%). but this is something that your average reader (ie my friend's mom) wouldn't know.



so i got to thinking, why would they mislead the reader so drastically? it must be because the real numbers they are working with are actually fractions of a percent (which is typical for cancer risk). well, saying that eating a lot of meat increases your risk of a particular cancer by 0.02% (a risk of 0.1% becomes 0.12%) doesn't make for a good article so rather than tell you the actual numbers they just say a 20% increase.



i found similarly misleading stats on peta's website as well.



to anyone who reads this and thinks im just seeing what i want to see, and im not giving the lifestyle a chance, i have this to say. i have studied health and science for years. i know how the body works. everything i know about the body tells me these sorts of diets and crazes and fads are not just unnecessary and based on poorly conducted or unfounded studies, but many are actually harmful to you. there is one diet out there that has been proven to be the most healthy, the most beneficial and is supported by literally decades of research: the food guide pyramid. anyone who tells you different is selling something.



it turns out your third grade teacher was right...



**one professor in particular gave a good example to show what i mean. in the 1800s there was a huge increase in the number of churches being constructed on the east coast. there was also a similar increase in the number of bars in the same areas. now at first glance, one could ASSUME that the because more people were going to church, they were also filled with guilt caused by their "fire and brimstone" preachers, and would use alcohol to numb the pain. or you could say that because of the increased number of bars, and therefore alcoholics, people were driven to church by guilt or by fear of god's wrath. but neither of these scenarios were actually the case. neither one of these increases in NUMBERS caused the other to increase. the real cause, he said, was nothing more than a simple increase in the number of people living there. a population boom, if you will.