Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I see your point and I agree. I understood your wrongly. Thanks for the clarification.

So another example would be relative effects in medical and nutritional studies. That the red meat was correlated with 3-fold increase of cancer in some tests is absolutely meaningless. What matters is the absolute size, because the 3x increase from 0.0001% chance to 0.0003% is something not worth even pausing a breath about.



>because the 3x increase from 0.0001% chance to 0.0003% is something not worth even pausing a breath about.

you must be kidding - http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/lifetime-probabili...

The risk of getting only colorectal cancer is almost 5% and dying from that cancer - 2%.

The total risk of getting any cancer is about 40% and dying from a cancer - 20%. Many of the cancers are significantly affected by healthy (or not) lifestyle/eating/drinking/etc..

I'd say your post is a perfect example of spreading of ignorance even when the Google is just one click away.

To the comment below: it seems you again ignored the chance to google for the info, in particular for the link between prostate cancer and red meat/obesity/etc. The same goes for breast cancer too. Even when specifically pointed out to easy available source of clear info, you still continue to spread ignorance.


I didn't imply I was using actual numbers. I was trying to clarify an issue. But since you ask.

The last study that made people panic about meat[0][1] estimated an increase of 18% of the chance you'll get colorectal cancer. Using your data, it means the rate of getting that cancer rises from 5% to 5.9% and the risk of dying from it rises from 2% to 2.36%. That is not a significant increase.

> The total risk of getting any cancer is about 40% and dying from a cancer - 20%. Many of the cancers are significantly affected by healthy (or not) lifestyle/eating/drinking/etc..

Well, it's important to qualify precisely. The list you provided shows that the dominant part of the 40%/20% stat is prostate (15%/2.7%) and breast cancer (12%/3%), followed by lung cancer (7%/6%). That's about 1/2 of your the risk of developing and dying from cancer accounted for in stuff not directly related to food and beverages. The rest is spread among other cancer types (turns out there's quite a lot of them) with most of them having rates below 3%/1%, so still, even 2-fold increase in risk of getting a particular type of cancer doesn't mean much.

[0] - http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/26/451950828/pro...

[1] - http://mashable.com/2015/10/31/processed-meat-cancer-risk/




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: