The slippery slope fallacy isn’t a fallacy when there really is a slippery slope. The puritans told us that tobacco was a unique product and that their tactics wouldn’t apply to others. They lied. So we had no safe level of smoking. This was followed by no safe level of alcohol and now there is no safe level of bacon sarnie…
Eating even the moderate amounts of red and processed meat sanctioned by government guidelines increases the likelihood of developing bowel cancer, according to the largest UK study of the risks ever conducted.
Apparently this comes from those daft enough to sign up for the biobank.
Mmm… Bacon sandwich.
“No pleasure is worth giving for the sake of another two years in a geriatric home in Weston-Super-Mare.” Kingsley Amis.
‘Nuff said?
My thought when I heard about this story on the radio this morning was, why is this considered to be news? Bunch of neopuritans telling everyone not to eat some stuff, just like they do every other day. Nobody is listening to them, nobody takes any notice of them and they ought to be defunded.
Well I should be one big colonic tumour by now!
Perhaps you are… Have you been tested, lately?
And the proof of this “expert” opinion is the literally millions of middle age people all dying in the streets of bowel cancer…
Can someone tell me if red wine is good or bad for you this week*? I’ve lost track of the benefits/harm drinking it will do or cause?
*The warnings might be on a daily basis nowadays … I can’t keep up with the food scares.
Just ignore them and eat/drink a varied and balanced diet, move about a bit. It is all pretty straightforward, you balance the pleasures of life against the risks, it’s hardly rocket science.
Another meaningless study, peppered with phrases like “a 20% increased risk of bowel cancer compared with those who averaged 21g a day” not, you’ll note: “a 20% increased incidence of bowel cancer compared with ….” (emphases mine). How, precisely, do they work out who is “at risk of bowel cancer” when, as far as I can see from the study, no-one has actually developed it??! Unless, of course, they’re just using a circular argument whereby, because they’ve decided that increased meat consumption = increased bowel cancer, they’ve simply totted-up that 20% of the participants ate more meat than the others and have therefore assumed that they must be at an increased risk! How’s that for formulating a self-fulfilling prophesy and then dressing it up as science?
Not to mention the fact that they don’t actually mention what the baseline risk for developing bowel cancer actually is amongst the low-level meat eaters, so it’s impossible to work out what this mysterious 20% actually means, in real terms. So, what is the baseline figure? One in a million, one in 100,000, one in 1,000, one in 10? It’s an important omission, because an increase of 20% on one in a million is a miniscule amount, whereas an increase of 20% on one in 10 would be very significant indeed.
Yet another health “study” no doubt cobbled-together by a group of zealous vegetable-munchers in an effort to promote their anti-meat agenda. And of course, taken up with zeal by the lazy journalists at the Graun – known for their reluctance not to let the real truth ever get in the way of a good, scary headline to frighten their gullible readers.