Hyping health effects: a news analysis of the ‘new smoking’ and the role of sitting

Media reports of the ‘new smoking’ have proliferated with little consideration of the disease burden of emergent risk factors. We consider the example of prolonged sitting in particular. The ‘new smoking’ analogy is a powerful heuristic device that draws on the well-known dangers of tobacco smoking. Such attention-grabbing ‘factoids’ are rapidly disseminated and perpetuated,1 and can be difficult to dispel later. We quantified which health risks have been called the ‘new smoking’ and consider the epidemiological evidence for and the implications of these comparisons. We searched the Factiva database for news stories containing the phrases ‘is the new smoking’ or ‘as bad as smoking’ in 2012–2016. News stories containing these phrases were independently coded for the health risk being compared with smoking, along with article characteristics (eg, headline, name of publication, date of publication). We identified 614 unique news stories that contained the target phrases. The top 10 mentioned health risks and behaviours compared with smoking are presented in table 1. The most dominant topics were sitting and obesity, with 55% and 12% of stories, respectively. The total number of ‘new smoking’ or ‘as …