Misleading Factoid
The Economist magazine, who really ought to know better, wrote that
A study by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest showed that soft drinks were the single biggest contributor to calories in the American diet…
This sentence conveys no information whatsoever. An example will serve to illustrate the problem. Suppose that every day I drink two non-diet sodas (about 100 kcal each) and eat 1800 kcal of stew. Thus the “single biggest contributor to calories” is stew, at 90% of my total energy intake. Now, instead of just stating that I eat “stew”, let’s break it down into components. Suppose my stew contains beef, rice, goat, barley, peas, clams, mushrooms, noodles, tomatoes, and tofu, with each of these 10 components constituting 10% of the energy of the stew. Then my diet consists of 180 kcal of each of those items and 200 kcal of soda, making soda the “single biggest contributor to calories” in my diet.
All of this mess can be avoided by simply stating that 10% of my energy intake comes from soda, which is ultimately the relevant number, and the number which The Economist should have provided.
Similarly, I hate it when news organizations cite scientific papers as proving some fact, when there is no scientific consenses, or even the author of the paper they cite is claiming something much less strong. They have headlines like “Jelly donuts cause cancer!”, when all that was shown was that rats may have a slightly higher chance of getting cancer after being fed nothing but liquified jelly donuts intravenously for three straight months.