Earlier today I posted on a recent medical study that showed a 35% increase in colon cancer resulting from eating red meat daily. I criticized this because a 35% increase of a very small number is -- well -- a very small number. If I have my numbers right (and I would be very pleased to know if I'm off base here), this 35% increased risk is on the order of 0.1 percentage point. That is, 1 person out of 1000 who eats a lot of red meat daily is likely to get colon cancer compared to people who eat red meat only rarely. To be sure 1 person out of a 1000 is not zero, but it isn't a particularly big number either.

The study also found that (1) eating a lot of red meat and (2) not eating a lot of fish would combine to increase your colon cancer risk by 63%--something on the order of 0.2 percentage points or 2 persons out of 1000 (again if I have my math right).

But get this quote...Professor Tim Key, Deputy Director of Cancer Research UK's epidemiology unit, said: "We estimate that more than two thirds of colorectal cancer cases - 25,000 cases in the UK - could be avoided by changes in lifestyle in Western countries."

I can not see how this conclusion can be drawn. I read the study to say that at most 2 out of 1000 people would not get colon cancer if they switched away from eating red meat and into eating more fish. He is saying that 67 out of a 100 cases could be eliminated. To be sure, he may have been talking about the improvements from combining all lifestyle factors including obesity, lack of exercise, smoking, etc. But his number is 335 times greater than mine! This is too big a discrepency.

Either I am reading these studies all wrong or these guys need to go back to grade school for remedial mathematics.