No, Eating a Hot Dog Doesn’t Take 36 Minutes Off Your Life




As soon as I read this headline, the persuasion researcher and science writer in me went completely apoplectic. Inside Edition is not exactly famous for their high quality journalism, but their already dismal reputation doesn’t take away from the fact this article was promoted by outlets like CNN and ABC News as well, and promoted across the entire platform of Twitter, where individual tweets about the research had netted thousands of reactions. Most people who responded to the article (based on research out of the University of Michigan) seemed to be taking its message in earnest, trying to calculate how many hours of their lives they had shaved off by eating hot dogs, and speculating at the effects of other foods, such as Krispy Kreme donuts. This article and the public reaction to it is a perfect encapsulation of what is wrong with science reporting (and honestly, scientific research itself) today. It’s a veritable Bingo card of biased hypothesis formation, inappropriate data analysis, misleading summarization, and prejudiced, fatphobic interpretation, all rolled up in one absolutely rancid package. Let’s take a look:The first and perhaps most glaring issue with this study is that, like a lot of bad science reporting about food science, it attempts to assign measurable, individual-level consequences to an action that was studied in the aggregate. In other words, this study observed that there was a correlation between how many hot dogs people eat and their risk of mortality, a broadly true, widescale trend — but the researchers sought to personalize that big trend by assigning a specific minute value to the act of eating one hot dog. This kind of summary statistic is so simplistic as to be actively misleading. There is no medically observable effect of…