alt Hacker NewsStatistics and other lies.
One interesting point the article touches - there was a study concluding that if you quit smoking at 40 your life expectancy basically equalizes with people who did not smoke in their life. It is an encouraging message that it is never too late to quit. Then again it also sends a different message - you can smoke as you wish in your 20s.
Just yesterday I saw an article on Instagram that they are putting smoked meats and sausages and similar products in the came cancerogenic category as smoking. Which again one one hand states that meats are very bad for you. On the other hand it makes smoking not so bad as you would think? Because people are eating sausages and meats cooked on open fire for thousands of years?
Some guy on Diary of CEO states that rice are basically a poison because they are pure sugar. If you want to live healthy you should definitely drop the rice out of your die. Then again a billion of people eat rice every day. What gives?
We want to have all this information because we want informed decisions in our lives. If we are analytical we even want formulas and graphs just like in this article. What we don't want is to give things to chance and genetics.
Different breeds of dogs have life expectancy difference of ~50%. People of course are not so different in their size but we need to always keep this in mind. You can live as healthy as you like but you always have a ticking bomb in your DNA. What I still am not getting is how much living healthy impacts the outcome versus the genetics. It might be a hopeless fight to e.g. stop eating the brisket if your lungs have an expiry date of 55 years.
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> Just yesterday I saw an article on Instagram that they are putting smoked meats and sausages and similar products in the came cancerogenic category as smoking.
But not the same lung capacity impact category .. the emphysema rates from smoked meats are considerably lower than those from smoking.
To me it sends the message that people who quit smoking tend to live longer than people who don't, but not that the act of quitting smoking had anything to do with anything. Specifically, if someone without the mindset to naturally quit smoking sees that study and quits only to hopefully live longer, they may not benefit nearly as much as someone who actually cares enough to more generally quit harming themselves.
> Just yesterday I saw an article on Instagram that they are putting smoked meats and sausages and similar products in the came cancerogenic category as smoking.
My understanding is that this is a statement of how confident we are in the evidence that smoked meats and sausages are carcinogenic. Essentially, we are very sure that smoking is very carcinogenic and we are also very sure that smoked meats and sausages are a tiny bit carcinogenic.