Leafy Greens Top Risky Food List

Also important, the number of people affected by unhealthy diet will be substantially higher. This is why they say there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Risky foods, to me, are ones that are likely to give you a heart attack when you're 35. Ones that give you a 1:45000 chance of illness (to say nothing of serious complications) are quite safe.

Not to mention, we aren't exactly comparing apples to apples here. Leafy greens covers a heck of a lot more individual food items than oysters.

It just goes to show that you should never, ever take statistics at face value.

Thank you. This is a major problem with how media portrays data in news stories. Most people would see 50k over 9 years as a huge number, but if it were instead presented as an individual having a %0.002 chance of getting ill from these foods, or as about %0.0022 of the population is affected per year, the story takes on new meaning. Understanding how to present data like this should be required learning for journalists.

Of course there is always the chance that this is deliberate, and done to make the story more sensationalistic, but I prefer to follow Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

No, it's basically a list of foods commonly consumed raw. The chicken was far more likely to make you sick when consumed raw, but the salmonella died somewhere around 150°F.