The real risk of eating that hotdog

MY ATTENTION was grabbed recently by a headline which claimed that: ‘Eating a hotdog could take 36 minutes off your life.’ This came from a study by the University of Michigan, U.S., where they worked out the impact on our health of eating a serving of more than 5,800 foods.

One of the examples they cited was hotdogs, which they said took 36 minutes off life expectancy. But on the plus side, eating a small handful of nuts could add 26 minutes.

But how do they come up with these figures? I dug more deeply into other research, which broadly agreed that eating a serving of processed meat daily is associated with a 15 per cent higher risk of ‘all-cause mortality’. In other words, your risk of dying over the next year is 15 per cent higher if you regularly eat processed meat than if you don’t. If you do some clever calculations, that translates into about 36 minutes shaved off your life for every hotdog you eat. Which you may, or may not, decide is good reason to leave hotdogs alone. I am suspicious about the precision of these numbers, but I like the approach to try to make the relative risk of eating different foods a bit clearer. Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at Cambridge University, has taken the idea further with something he calls ‘microlives’. This involves estimating how much any given activity will add, or take away, from your life.

Based on studies he calculated that smoking two cigarettes, having two alcoholic drinks, eating a portion of processed meat, being 5kg overweight or watching two hours of TV a day will all knock about 30 minutes off your life.

But taking a statin could add 30 minutes, while doing 20 minutes of moderate exercise daily will add an hour. Even better, getting your five-aday could add two hours.

What I deduce from this is that if you eat a good diet and stay active, it is unlikely that consuming the odd hotdog is going to make a lot of difference to your life expectancy.