Living longer is good. But a lot of things are good. When living longer comes at the expense of living better, we all have to decide on our own priorities.

The International Agency of Research into Cancer (IARC) last week confirmed that carnivores face higher cancer risk: Processed meats are a Group 1 carcinogen.

While activist groups like to point to scary Group 1 carcinogens like plutonium, they usually ignore that oral contraceptives and sunlight have the same classification. Classification only says that there is a risk, not how big the risk is. Nevertheless, Google News reports that about 2,700 news stories in the past week mentioned bacon alongside plutonium.

University of Auckland statistician Thomas Lumley regularly helps cut through the nonsense surrounding media interpretations of health studies at his blog, StatsChat. He points to Cancer Research UK, who put the figures in context: for every thousand people who eat a lot of processed meat, 66 will get bowel cancer sometime; for every thousand people who eat very little, 56 will get bowel cancer. So you can reduce your risk of cancer by about a percentage point by avoiding processed meats. Eating plutonium is just a bit riskier.

Even still, small risks over a lot of people add up. The UK group expects 8800 fewer Brits would develop bowel cancer per year if everyone avoided processed and red meat. Adjusting for population size, that would be just over 600 Kiwis.

Suppose somebody put together a study tallying all of the costs that meat-eating imposes on the public health system. It would ignore how much I enjoy eating free-range bacon and count only the one percentage point increase in my likelihood of getting cancer. Would that make the case for a meat tax, restrictions on advertising, or bans on meat in schools? Hardly.

For better or worse, and generally for better, New Zealand has a public health system that ensures that everyone has access to taxpayer-funded basic health care. The deal would be rather different if having a public health system justified the government’s regulating and taxing away our choices to help to keep the costs down. Public health advocates do not have a ruler on which they can measure how much I enjoy bacon, my daily drink, and the occasional soda. How to balance living longer and living tastier is a choice best left to each of us.