I recently learned from a doctor friend that salt isn’t necessarily bad for you. Yes, there is a minority whose blood pressure isdriven haywire by eating the stuff, but most people can consume it without much risk. The reason we are formally advised to avoid salt is that lowering salt consumption improves public health on average: salt reduction is helpful to the few who are affected, while being generally harmless for everyone else.
This makes sense at first. Except it leads to a problem. Because if you demonise every food that is harmful only to a minority, you risk recommending so many dietary restrictions that life becomes intolerable. A better answer may lie in personalised medicine: ‘In your case, I’d concentrate on avoiding three things first.’
The notion that any solution which is good on average must also be good overall is dangerously plausible, but often wrong. If the government designed pizzas, each would be 25 per cent covered in pineapple, since that is what the average pizza customer wants. In reality nobody wants this at all: they either want the stuff slathered everywhere or else nowhere in sight, believing that the first Hawaiian pizza emerged from the bowels of Satan himself.
The very idea of an average is also an obstacle to identifying and solving problems, because it represents a problem as monolithic when it is not. As I suggested recently, the aim of reducing train overcrowding is silly: if 100 people have to stand 5 per cent of the time it’s not a problem: if five commuters have to stand 100 per cent of the time it is.
Why then do policy-makers obsess about averages? First, most statistics are presented in this form, as a composite snapshot.
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