Help! Does anyone know what "15 times less energy" means?

[Towlie]

Here's a paragraph from a CNN article posted today about sugar and cancer:

Fermentation of sugar to lactic acid produces about 15 times less energy than respiration of sugar, Thevelein noted. Yet cancer cells "grow much more rapidly than normal cells, and yeast actually grows the fastest when they ferment," he noted.

I can't figure out what that means. It seems to me that if something produces one unit of energy then something that produces 15 times less energy produces 14 units of negative energy, whatever that is.

[Girard442]

1. Bad writing, but I think: 1/15, or 6.67%

Should say:

Fermentation of sugar to lactic acid produces about one fifteenth the energy of respiration of sugar...

[jberryhill]

2. It means that people who write copy for CNN aren't particularly skilled at it

That's what it means.

If fermentation produces 1 unit of energy, then respiration (oxidation) produces 15 units of energy, is what they were probably driving at.

It's kind of a silly comparison to make in this context anyway. Yes, different organisms are going to metabolize things different ways.