Death by misadventure
We all know that smoking is bad for our health and that eating vegetables is good for it. Yet how bad and how good are they? […]
To answer his own question, Spiegelhalter converted reams of statistical risk tables into a simple metric: a microlife—30 minutes. If you smoke two cigarettes, you lose 30 minutes of your life. Exercise for 20 minutes, and you gain two units of microlife.
