What is a red herring?

A red herring is a term used to describe a misleading tangent or story in a debate or argument that distracts the other from the real issue. An example of this (and this is a very illogical one) could be of two people debating the merits of the healthiness of eating fast-food, and one of the people might argue that over 90% of Americans eat Mcdonalds. Although that would be a very frightening fact if true, the statistic about how many people, takes the attention away from the fact that it's still not very good for you. Does that make sense?