Being partial to a nice bottle of red wine, especially if the grape is Zinfandel and it comes from California, I was more than a little alarmed to see a headline in the newpapers recently claiming that a new study says that just one glass of red wine per day could increase your chance of getting throat cancer by 168%.

168%!

Gosh that’s a huge increase isn’t it? I bet a lot of people who read that would be worried.

But what is very annoying, when you look into the detail of the article, is that they never tell you what the baseline is. What is the 168% increase on top of?

If the real chance of getting throat cancer is 1 in 1 million then a 168% increase on that turns a miniscule chance into a slightly more than miniscule but still miniscule chance.

Such articles are becoming more and more prevalent and they often contradict each other – after all red wine is meant to be good for the heart isn’t it?

If you see such an article try writing to the newspaper and asking why the journalist missed out the very important baseline upon which his scary statistics were based. I’m sure that their intention wasn’t to mislead. It’s not scary, it’s just sloppy.

Now pass me another glass of zinny!