• Question: How do you detect if someone can get cancer from the certain lifestyle choices that you're testing?

    Asked by emanuel to Wei on 20 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by hippo.
    • Photo: Wei Xun

      Wei Xun answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Hi Emanuel!

      I use the power of statistics. Since there are no certainty as I had explain before, we can work out how likely that something will happen to someone (ie developing cancer) in relation to the lifestyle choice, let’s say eating red meat. So if the people eating a lot of red meat are more likely to get colon cancer than those eating less, we can suggest that there might be a link between the two.

      But of course it might not be the meat-eating at all, it might be something related like not eating enough vegetables. We won’t know for sure unless we also know how much veg they eat too, then we can test using statistics again which way round it is.

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