Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by riku_iki 831 days ago
Other commenter pointed on actual study, and study actually says that sugar soda induced much much higher rate of disease: hazard ratio of 1.21 for sugar soda vs 1.03 for artificial sweetener soda.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00029...

2 comments

Note that when deciding if that is something to worry about you need to consider the base rate for the control group.

For example if I was choosing between an activity that killed 100 out of 400 people that did it and one that killed 121 out of 400 I'd pick the first. Picking the second would raise my death probability from 25% to 30.25%. That's over a 5% increase in my death probability.

On the other hand if I was choosing between something that killed 100 out of 100 million and something that killed 121 out of 100 million, I'd probably not really consider the differences in death probabilities. For the first I've got a death probability of 0.0001% and for the second I've got a death probability of 0.000121%. My death probability is only 0.000021% higher in the second activity.

In both cases the hazard ratio is 1.21, but with the second pair of events the probability of encountering the hazard is so low a 21% increase doesn't actually make enough of a difference for me to worry about it.

its reasonable note.

In the studies there were 170k participants with 13k disease cases during observed period, so looks like hazard rate was significant enough.

for context, what is a hazard ratio? I don't see that defined anywhere
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

(I'm just going on Googling here, not an expert)

From reading that link, I think it works like this:

A hazard ratio of 1.0 means "no hazard, or no difference from the control".

A hazard ratio of 1.21 means "21% more hazardous than the control"