No, Eating a Hot Dog Doesn’t Take 36 Minutes Off Your Life
Drinking wine doesn’t extend your lifespan either.
Drinking wine doesn’t extend your lifespan either.
Two days ago, I opened up Twitter to find out that this shoddy piece of science reporting from Inside Edition was trending:
Eating a Single Hot Dog May Take 36 Minutes Off Your Life, Study Says
Bad news for BBQ lovers and eating competitors alike - eating a single hot dog may take 36 minutes off your life…www.insideedition.com
As soon as I read this headline, the persuasion researcher and science writer in me went completely apoplectic. Inside Edition is not exactly famous for their high quality journalism, but their already dismal reputation doesn’t take away from the fact this article was promoted by outlets like CNN and ABC News as well, and promoted across the entire platform of Twitter, where individual tweets about the research had netted thousands of reactions. Most people who responded to the article (based on research out of the University of Michigan) seemed to be taking its message in earnest, trying to calculate how many hours of their lives they had shaved off by eating hot dogs, and speculating at the effects of other foods, such as Krispy Kreme donuts.
This article and the public reaction to it is a perfect encapsulation of what is wrong with science reporting (and honestly, scientific research itself) today. It’s a veritable Bingo card of biased hypothesis formation, inappropriate data analysis, misleading summarization, and prejudiced, fatphobic interpretation, all rolled up in one absolutely rancid package. Let’s take a look:
The first and perhaps most glaring issue with this study is that, like a lot of bad science reporting about food science, it attempts to assign measurable, individual-level consequences to an action that was studied in the aggregate. In other words, this study observed that there was a correlation between how many hot dogs people eat and their risk of mortality, a broadly true, widescale trend — but the researchers sought to personalize that big trend by assigning a specific minute value to the act of eating one hot dog.
This kind of summary statistic is so simplistic as to be actively misleading. There is no medically observable effect of eating a single hot dog, and even if there were, that physical effect couldn’t be quantified in terms of minutes taken off your life. No person has a measurable lifespan until after they have already died. We can estimate a person’s life expectancy by taking into account risk factors, such as smoking, but we can’t actually quantify the specific, by-the-minute impact of their actions. We are always missing a litany of variables, and the more we try to zero in the impact on a single, specific choice, the less clear and accurate our picture is going to be.
Even with a risk as undeniable and well-documented as smoking, it’s nonsensical to try and distill the impact of a single cigarette, in terms of hours taken off someone’s life. The impact a cigarette has on your health is determined by your overall habits more than any single choice, as well as your genetics, your nutrition, your activity level, your stress, your social connectedness, and numerous other factors that interact with and countervail against the impact of that cigarette itself. If you are not a regular smoker, a single cigarette may have zero impact on your overall wellbeing at all.
This brings me to the second major issue with this study: it presents the act of eating a single hot dog as a risk factor in and of itself, when everything we know about human health runs counter to this. The human body does an incredible job of repairing and replacing damaged tissues, and at processing and removing toxins from the body. This means that low-grade, intermittent exposure to a truly “unhealthy” substance often has no cumulative effect at all.
Let’s return again to the example of smoking: This study published in Nature describes how, after a smoker quits using nicotine, the healthy, unmutated cells in their lungs proliferate, replacing damaged tissues. Within about five years, ex smokers’ lungs tend to be about 40% comprised of healthy tissue again — even if they had smoked for decades before. Many of the negative health effects of smoking (like poorer wound healing) go away very quickly after quitting. This means it’s inaccurate to claim (as many articles have) that a single cigarette takes 11 minutes off your life. A single cigarette by itself would have no long-term impact on you, because your body would heal the damage far more quickly than it would accrue.
The same is true of reportedly risky or “unhealthy” foods, such as hot dogs, or substances like alcohol. Contrary to the marketing of a lot of “detoxifying” products, most bodies don’t need help getting rid of dangerous substances in our beverages and foods. The liver and kidneys are already very much adept at that. The only time a bodily toxin or poison proves to be a problem is when a person’s body is flooded with too much of a substance, too quickly, such that the kidneys and liver can’t keep up with it and filter it all out in time.
This is what happens when, for example, a person gets ill or dies from a Tylenol overdose: a small dose of acetaminophen is processed by the body so easily that there is no long-term negative impact of having taken it. It doesn’t build up in the body, and it doesn’t take any minutes off of your life, despite being a pretty dangerous substance in large enough doses. But if you accidentally take a couple pills too many all at once, your liver can’t keep up and it begins to break down. You don’t need to go on a “detox” to purge your body of left over acetaminophen, nor do you need to drink a special purifying tea: you just need to not overdose, and let your liver do its job.
The same, by the way, is generally true of the relationship between anti-oxidants and another food science boogeyman, “free radicals.” Your body generally manages to keep the two in balance pretty effectively on its own, and there aren’t really any documented benefits to attempting to “cleanse” free radicals away or counteract them by ingesting “superfoods.” In fact, taking antioxidant supplements unnecessarily can be more dangerous than just letting your body do its thing.
This leads into the next major problem with the University of Michigan hot dog study: it attempts to take a complex food, with a litany of nutritional benefits as well as risks, and distill it into a single negative quality. And sure, if we want to speak very generally about health trends, hot dogs do have some negative attributes: they are high in sodium, which can be bad for people with high blood pressure, for instance. But many people can consume high levels of sodium with no negative blood pressure effects. The impact salt will have on an individual person’s cardiovascular health is not easy to predict: it depends on their genetics, stress levels, medications they are on, and other risk factors, not just whether they ate a hot dog.
Furthermore, it’s intellectually dishonest and scientifically very shallow to only talk about a food in terms of its negative effects. A hot dog is not a morally tainted, encased sodium bomb: it’s a cheap, easy-to-prepare protein source that has brought comfort and fuel to numerous people living in poverty. It’s a ubiquitous, simple-tasting snack that has helped many a harried parent keep their kids fed and sated. It’s also an immense source of comfort, evoking for many of us memories of ballparks and county fairs. The psychological benefits of a comfort food are not something easily discounted. Neither is the very real necessity of being able to access an affordable, calorie-dense food.
This fact really gets to the heart of why studies like these are so irresponsible: they attempt to pin the blame for far-reaching healthcare disparities on the actions of people who have very little free choice. If you are toiling all day at a construction site and have almost no energy left at the end of the day too cook a nutritious meal for yourself, you might need to quickly boil up a hot dog. If your kids are picky eaters and they’re screaming in your face with hanger all afternoon, a hot dog might be the only thing to bring them (and you) some peace.
It’s not a coincidence that when researchers examine the negative impact of a food, it’s nearly always one relied upon by people in poverty. In the University of Michigan study, other foods that were documented to “shorten” the lifespan included pizza and hamburgers (relatively cheap, calorie-dense foods widely accessible throughout the United States). The foods documented to “lengthen” the lifespan were mostly fruits and vegetables such as avocados, which could never serve as a full meal for any adult human, least of all one who is working on their feet all day in an under-paying service sector job.
Disenfranchised people living in food deserts or with very little income often have no choice but to eat foods that the wealthier among us look down on as “unhealthy” or disgusting. Why not study the long-term health impacts of living under such circumstances? How many years does living in poverty shave off your life? How many minutes are taken off your life expectancy every time you go to bed hungry? Why would any socially responsible researcher want to document the effect of a single person eating one hot dog (which cannot actually be measured in any meaningful way, for all the reasons I explained) when they could instead study the massive consequences of income inequality? Why put the blame on individuals making “bad choices” when you could highlight the costs of medical fatphobia and racism?
Studies like this one really serve to illustrate that so long as scientific research is conducted by humans, it can never be fully objective. When a research team sets out to study a phenomenon, their chosen method, their research questions, and how they report their data are all informed by their biases and their cultural frame. And our present cultural frame is one where personal choices are heavily moralized and politicized. Instead of looking at the systemic causes of broad patterns of behavior (say, how a lack of election day holidays drives low voter turnout), we blame lazy or irresponsible people for failing to make the “correct” choice.
We do this even when the ostensibly correct choice is so difficult, time-consuming, and expensive as to be practically impossible for most people. Instead of looking at how unfriendly public spaces are to pedestrians, we blame individuals for having an oversized personal carbon footprint. Rather than giving recently-vaccinated people paid days off of work to recover from side effects, we demonize the unvaccinated as the root of Delta spread. And instead of examining the many reasons why impoverished people have worse heart health, we shame them for eating hot dogs.
Because each of us has been taught to moralize individual actions so heavily, we lap up science reporting that feeds into this frame. We want desperately to know whether wine is “good” or “bad” for us, and to quantify precisely how much each Bud Light seltzer kills us. We want to personalize the general, and shrink the structural, assigning a numeric and moral value to every single action we take. But the real scientific truth, the one that takes not only the methods but also the philosophy of science into account, is that certain things are unknowable. There is a limit to what we can statistically summarize and predict. The personal and the general are not the same. And there is a real danger to scientists confidently claiming to know the things we cannot know.