A single day of overindulgence: Hours off your life? (1284 hits)
Chicago Sun Times By Eryn Brown
The risks of bad behaviors are well known but not necessarily well understood. Most people are aware that binging on red meat, cigarettes and whiskey on a regular basis isn't good for us -- but how to make sense of the severity of the risk? When a study reports that adults who ate an extra portion of red meat had a 13% greater chance of dying over the course of a study that spanned more than 20 years, what does that really mean? And what is a sensible person to do about it?
Writing in the journal BMJ (subscription required) on Monday, University of Cambridge biostatistician and risk communication expert David Spiegelhalter (who blogs about uncertainty here) suggested that the typical response is likely to be a shrug -- and with good reason. "People tend to dismiss effects that are perceived to lie in the distant future," he wrote, going on to quote author (and legendary drinker) Kingsley Amis' observation that "no pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatrichome."
But a pleasure might be worth giving up, Spiegelhalter suggested, if people did it for the sake of the time they stood to lose every single day. By expressing a lost year of life in the far smaller, but more fathomable, units of microlives per day -- defined as chunks of 30 minutes, or one-millionth of the average person's life after age 35 -- the risks might become keenly comprehensible.
