Sweet as
The Herald gets a bit excitable about a JAMA Internal Medicine paper saying it’s not healthy to eat lots and lots of sugar. The story says
One sugar-sweetened beverage a day is enough to increase the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD) affecting the heart and arteries.
With the statistical analysis done in the paper that’s really an assumption, not a conclusion — the analysis assumes an exponentially-increasing risk for additional sugar consumption, so if lots of sugar is bad, a little bit will automatically be thought to be bad.
The Herald’s lead was
Consuming too many sugary sweets, desserts and drinks can triple your chances of dying from heart disease.
That’s pretty much what the research paper says, but as always “compared to what?” Here’s the graph from the paper showing the estimated risk (solid line), the uncertainty, and the actual distribution of people’s sugar consumption
There’s a lot of uncertainty around the risk line, even assuming that the model is correct. More importantly, most people, even in the US, aren’t anywhere near the levels of sugar consumption that get you a tripling of risk.
There’s more detailed commentary at the UK “Behind the Headlines”. Eating lots of additional sugar isn’t good for you. But you knew that already.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »