Main content

WSMoreOrLess: Can we trust food surveys?

Stories about what foods are good and bad for you are always popular online and in the news. But how do experts know what people are eating?

Stories about what foods are good and bad for you, which foods are linked to cancer and which have beneficial qualities are always popular online and in the news. But how do experts know what people are eating? Tim Harford speaks to Christie Aschwanden, FiveThirtyEight’s lead writer for science, about the pitfalls of food surveys. She kept a food diary and answered nutrition surveys and found many of the questions were really hard to answer – how could she tell all the ingredients in a restaurant curry; and how many tomatoes did she eat regularly over the past six months?
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Charlotte McDonald/Wesley Stephenson

Release date:

Available now

9 minutes

Unlock the history and truth behind the data with The OU

Explore how numbers shape, and sometimes mislead us, with The Open University.

When can you trust statistics?

When can you trust statistics?

Ä¢¹½¶ÌÊÓÆµ Ideas discovers three easy ways to help make sense of statistics.

Podcast