Let's ban vegans, instead...

More voodoo math scare tactics:

A US non-profit organization filed a lawsuit on Wednesday asking a New Jersey county court to force food companies to put labels warning of cancer risks on any hot dogs they sell in New Jersey.

Described by the Los Angeles Times (LAT) as a vegan advocacy group, Cancer Project, wants food companies like Oscar Mayer and Hebrew National, big names in the hot dog world, to put labels on their hot dogs warning that eating this product and other processed meats "increases the risk of cancer".

The group refers to a report from the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund where scientists say there is no safe amount of processed meat that can be eaten, and that just one 50-gram serving of bacon, sausage, deli meats or other processed meats, every day increases a person's chance of getting colorectal cancer by 21 per cent on average.

These people really get my knickers in a twist. This is nothing but a back-door attempt to ban meat, perpetrated by the monumentally idiotic Enviro-Hippiefreak Complex. It contains not a shred of scientific validity. Let's do some math...

According to the National Cancer institute, the annual incidence rate of colorectal cancer in a normalized adult population sample during 2006 was 45.45/100,000, or about .045%. So, a marginal shift of 21% (45.45/.79) results in a revised incidence rate of 57.53/100,000, or about .057%. That yields a total rate shift of .012% -- about 1/100th of one percent, or one in ten thousand odds. Get yourself a set of percentile dice (d100); the odds of being within the shift value these "vegans" claim is generated by eating processed meat is exactly the same as your chances of rolling a "01" result three times in a row.

I won't bother to run the numbers demonstrating that value to be well within the statistical margin of error, since it should be patently obvious to anyone who passed sixth grade bone-head math -- even a "vegan".