Hello, I'm Monica Reinagel, and you're listening to the nutrition divis quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Anxiety about food runs high these days,

fueled by a constant stream of headlines on the dangers,

both real and imagined, of various dietary choices.

From scary sounding chemicals and are processed foods to bacterial contamination of fresh vegetables, it seems that no food group is immune.

There are so many ways that careless reporting contributes to this general hysteria.

Headline writers regularly confuse correlation with causation.

Reporters fail to distinguish between relative and absolute risk.

They misconstrue the meaning of the word significant as it's used

in statistical analysis as having the same meaning that we give it in the real world.

And these are all things that I've talked about before but

there's another important distinction that I haven't written about the difference

between a hazard and a risk.

Last week, for example, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research

on Cancer, that's IARC, declared red meat to be a probable carcinogen and virtually all of the

reporting that I saw talked about red meat increasing your risk of cancer or causing

cancer.

Yet this classification of red meat as a probable carcinogen

had nothing to do with risk assessment.

It was a hazard assessment.

And according to IARC's website, the distinction between a hazard and a risk is important.

An agent is considered a cancer hazard, they explain, if it's capable of causing cancer under some circumstances.

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