'20% greater risk of getting bowel cancer if you eat bacon sandwiches!', said some news headlines a little while ago.

We're all used to news reports which aim to shock us with eyecatching numbers. But how worried should we actually be by statistics such as this?

Professor David Spiegelhalter loves analysing headlines to find out what if any truth there is in them! Using a straightforward numerical approach he shows us how to work out what is really being said so we can decide for ourselves what the risk is in eating bacon sandwiches, and whether we need to stop eating them or not.

This video forms part of a set of free online mathematics education resources designed to help school students develop a better understanding of how to interpret statistics and how to evaluate risk. For accompanying resources, see

http://maths.org/MathsHealth
http://nrich.maths.org/12168

David Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. The resources were created by the Millennium Mathematics Project (maths.org) at the University of Cambridge, originally for our Motivate programme, and development was funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust.