WS MoreOrLess: Global Footprint
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2015
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Global Footprint We’re often told that we consume so much that we need one and a half planets. It comes from the Global Footprint Network a think-tank that has pioneered ecological foot-printing but what does that number even mean, and is it helpful? Chocolate makes you thinner We tell the story behind the chocolate experiment designed to deliberately fool the press. Concerned about the amount of pseudo-science surrounding diet and nutrition, John Bohannon and Peter Onneken ran a trial and had the results published in an online journal, sent out a press release. While the results were correct the trial wasn’t very robust but this didn’t stop the story that chocolate made you thinner running in newspapers, magazines and on TV around the world. Peter and John had fooled the press and they made a documentary about it. But the experiment has sparked a debate about whether it was ethical to fool the press in this way and whether the whole project was just self-serving.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the short edition of More or Less. |
| 0:02.0 | First broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:09.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts |
| 0:11.0 | and our terms of use go to BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:18.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:22.0 | We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us. |
| 0:25.0 | Or as one loyal listener put it, |
| 0:27.0 | we're an island of truth in a sea of idiocy. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:32.0 | We received this email from a new listener, Oscar, in the UK. |
| 0:36.0 | A few times over the last couple of years, |
| 0:38.0 | I've heard that if every individual on the planet consumed as much as the average American does, |
| 0:43.0 | the human population would need to inhabit four Earths in order to sustain itself. |
| 0:48.0 | How much truth is there to this? |
| 0:50.0 | Is it even a relevant way of representing data? |
| 0:53.0 | As a smug Brit, I'd like to believe it, but it seems unlikely. |
| 0:57.0 | Well, Charlotte McDonnell is here in the studio. |
| 0:59.0 | You've pinned down the source of this stat, haven't you? |
| 1:01.0 | Yeah, so it's from a think tank called the Global Footprint Network, |
| 1:05.0 | based in California. |
| 1:06.0 | Its director is a man called Mattis Wachanago, |
... |
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