Interesting Links for 27-10-2015

[andrewducker]

• Tax credit cuts will leave the low-paid facing a 93 per cent effective tax rate
  • (tags: welfare work tax uk )
• Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines
  • (tags: Google ai search )
• Former Greece finance minister Yanis Varoufakis is setting up a Europe-wide movement to democratise the EU
  • (tags: democracy Greece Europe )
• Processed meats

Comments

[steer]

I am not sure the figures in that article about red meat are very good.

The study apparently claims (though I can't find this so clearly stated in the actual data) that 3.3% of premature deaths in the study could have been avoided had that person eaten less processed meats. That is an astoundingly high amount. Yes it isn't as high as smoking but it is getting within an order of magnitude. It seems likely it is going to put it into the top ten causes for early death. Put it another way. Roll 2 d6. On a double six you died early because of the amount of red meat you ate (I'm rounding). Comfortable with those odds? I'm not -- note that I didn't even condition on the fact you were eating any. So if that number is true, I'm certainly going to cut down my consumption of processed meat.

One reason, perhaps, that the article you linked comes out so differently is what is compared. The comparison is with 50g of processed meat and 100g of red meat a day (it's unclear whether this is 150 g of meat or 100g of meat 50g of which is processed -- my reading of the original article would be that it is 100g of meat total). The UK guidelines are 70g per day. So the comparison point is with someone slightly exceeding government guidelines. For smoking they have picked to compare with someone smoking two packs per day. That is a quite astounding amount to smoke. UK government statistics classify 20 or more per day as "heavy smoker" and that's only around 1/5 of smokers. I found a report with some stats from 1985 saying 14% of smokers were 40 or more cigarettes per day. I'm betting that has dropped a lot since.

In other words the comparison done is between someone eating slightly more than the government says is a healthy limit for meat and someone smoking a really quite crazy amount of cigarettes.

And yes, cigarettes are more harmful -- the excess deaths from smoking is about 80 times as much worldwide as the excess deaths from meat eating. But, you know what, cigarettes are really incredibly bad for you. Finding something that is within a couple of orders of magnitude as bad for you... that's still pretty bad for you.

[andrewducker]

It is still pretty bad for you, if that's right.

And I should probably cut down my processed-meat consumption. But I love salami so much!

Mmmmm, pepperami.

[steer]

Actually, I realise to my shame, I have made one cock up there. The 1 in 33 thing is the proportion of early deaths caused by such cancers not the raw probability of your early death being caused by it. Nonetheless colo-rectal cancers are a really common cause of premature death.

I can live without salami or bacon -- I am very keen on chorizo though.

[andrewducker]

How many deaths are early?

[steer]

I didn't forget this comment I just managed to spot a load of inconsistencies in the whole thing. It seems that various articles were giving rates of incidence for UK and some for the world. Turns out in the UK we eat a lot of processed meat compared with the rest of the world and smoke a lot less. So the statistics turn out to be pretty complex. In the UK it looks as if the excess deaths from processed meats may be within an order of magnitude of those of smoking - which would be incredibly high if true. But we don't (as a nation) smoke that much and we do consume a lot of processed meats.

Unfortunately, I'm not now going to find time to work through this properly before going on holiday tomorrow.

[andrewducker]

Unforgivable!

(Have a great holiday!)

[steer]

Diving with sharks, diving with manatees, visiting the space shuttle launch centre and driving a stupidly overpowered muscle car the length of the Florida keys. I surely will have a good holiday. :-)

[andrewducker]

Sounds amazing!