Wednesday, February 05, 2014
Worst use of numbers
This NFR piece on sugar intake easily wins the Worst Use Of Numbers award for the whole fucking decade. The article uses three different units (calories, teaspoons, grams). Teaspoon is a volume unit, gram is a mass unit, and calorie is not a unit at all in this context. It's an estimate of what happens in your body after you eat the sugar. None of those units are properly interchangeable or convertible, and the article tumbles around between them without ever giving a clue to the main point.
At one point the article suggests that 22 teaspoons is three times the appropriate amount. Okay, what's that in grams? What's that in calories? Doesn't say. Food packages list contents in grams, but the article never tells us a limit in grams.
Now comes a new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which finds that Americans who consumed the most sugar — about a quarter of their daily calories — were twice as likely to die from heart disease as those who limited their sugar intake to 7 percent of their total calories. To translate that into a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, the big sugar eaters were consuming 500 calories a day from sugar — that's 31 teaspoons. Those who tamed their sweet tooth the most, by contrast, were taking in about 160 calories a day from sugar — or about 10 teaspoons per day.Huh? I have no fucking idea what any of this means. Your job as a "journalist" is to pick a meaningful unit and STICK WITH THAT FUCKING UNIT. In this case grams, the unit on packages, is obviously the meaningful unit. You also have resources that are completely unavailable to the ordinary listener or reader. As an official "journalist" working for a supercool supercommie ultraorthodox Gaia-worshipping Satan-worshipping outfit like NFR, you can call the Gaia-worshipping Satan-worshipping baby-killing AMA and demand a better explanation. If you are not going to use the resources that uniquely belong to your job, you should quit your fucking job. ¶ 8:36 AM
