LTBP

2 — The number of strips of bacon a person has to eat every day to see a 19 percent rise in the risk for pancreatic cancer. That’s about 50 grams of processed meat. Source: “Pancreatic Cancer Risk Increases With Every 2 Strips of Bacon You Eat: Study,” CBS.

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Vital Signs: The Man With 2 Hearts; Painkiller Addictions; Eating Bacon - Nicholas Jackson - Health - The Atlantic

OK, this gets headlines. BUT IT IS WRONG. The “19% rise” thing is ever so impressive, but if you read the article, it turns out to correspond to a 0.00002641% increase in your lifetime chance of getting pancreatic cancer. If you’re a man. If you’re a woman, it’s even lower.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a single metastudy of 6,000 pancreatic cancer patients can’t possibly identify probabilities that small with any accuracy. And that if you tried to replicate this result somehow, you would fail. Not that anybody will.

(via felixsalmon)