I bet there is someone, somewhere who does not exercise, has a terrible diet, and smokes cigarettes who will live for well over 100 years.
There was some news out today about red meat increasing your chance of developing cancer. No sooner were people coming up with illogical arguments such as: ‘I have eaten red meat all my life and I’m fine’.
These people are missing the point.
The thing these studies you hear about have, that the people calling up talk back don’t, is incredibly large sample groups. In other words, they look at hundreds, in some cases thousands or even tens of thousands of people and look at the trends.
For example, they may look at how many times they eat fruit and vegetables and then try and control for all other factors that may contribute (smoking, exercise, history of cancer, height etc). When they do this they can study the one factor (fruit and vegetables intake) in comparison to the study topic – i.e cancer risk.
Of course there is always going to be one that goes against the trend.
You just have to decide who you are going to listen to. The sample size of one, or 100+.
