First, a confession. Your correspondent drinks a lot of pop: caffeine free Diet Coke to be precise. So what, you ask?

Well, there I was reading Monday’s National Post on Monday, and a headline screamed: “Weekly pop may double pancreatic cancer risk.”

Weekly pop? How about six or more a day? Help me. But there’s the rub. First, I’m still alive, having also survived the HIN1 “pandemic” (not to mention global “cooling” and “acid rain” in the 1970s.) Second, am I the only one who finds these continuing health scare stories a bit much?

Rarely a week - a day? - goes by without some a study demonstrating that what we eat or drink or breathe dramatically increases our risks of catching something. Makes you wonder why our life spans continue to grow, but there you have it.

But then, if you believe the climate change industry, we’re all doomed anyway.

But back to pancreatic cancer. It is, of course, a serious disease. Some 3,900 Canadians will get it this year, and all but 100 or so of them will die. So this is no way is meant to diminish the tragedy of pancreatic cancer - or any other deadly disease. Only to point out that the more the death industry rattles on about imminent dangers - and the more the media blithely obliges - the tougher it becomes to convince people that some thing really are dangerous.

Anyway, a new study by researchers from the University of Minnesota - based on more than 60,000 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study who were followed for 14 years - says those that reported drinking two or more soft drinks per week had “an 87 percent chance increased risk of pancreatic cancer compared to those who didn’t drink soft drinks.”

So there you are. Eighty-seven percent. Better throw out the pop. (Unfortunately, whatever you replace it with, there’s no doubt a study showing that it too will increase your risks of getting something or other.)

Popular U.S. author Rita Mae Brown put the matter of statistics into perspective, saying, “the statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it’s you.”

And the late New York professor Aaron Levenstein once quipped, “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal s vital.”

So what this study “reveals” is that people who drink a lot of pop have an 87 percent increased chance of getting pancreatic cancer compared to somebody who doesn’t drink pop.

But what does that tell you, really? Among the 60,000 people in the 14-year study, 140 of them developed invasive pancreatic cancer. That’s .02 percent, pretty long odds. So an increase of 87 percent - while sounding dramatic -still makes the chances pretty slim. But worse, the 140 is the overall total. The story doesn’t’ report how many who drink more than two soft drinks a week actually got pancreatic cancer, as opposed to those who didn’t. Nor can we know with certainty how many of those people would have contracted it whether they drank pop or not.

But an 87 percent increased risk, just sitting by itself, sounds pretty scary, particularly since there is no attempt to put that risk in perspective.

Look at it this way. If you have a one-in-a-30- million chance of something bad happening to you and that doubles, it’s till only a one-in-15-million chance, even though a headline writer could legitimately (well, sort of) write that your “risk” has doubled.

Maybe, but so what if the chances are still remote? And particularly if we can’t really pin down a single reason why something happens.

Yet another study, of 88,794 U.S. nurses and 49,364 male health professionals, found that women who drank three or more sugar-sweetened drinks a week had a 57 percent great risk of pancreatic cancer than women who drank no more than one soft drink for month.

They found no impact at all among the male study group. And so it goes.

Pancreatic cancer certainly is bad news. It has the highest mortality rate of all the cancers. It’s treatable if caught early - though that’s difficult to do - and increases considerably with age.

Clearly, watching what you consume isn’t a bad thing. But I do wish we’d get away from the statistical games played by the cancer industry - along with the environmental industry, and many others - and report things in context.

As author Robert Boynton put it, “Statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during wartime.”

Think about it.