Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#11

Post by PunchTornado »

> as recently as December 2016 he was the senior author on a similar study that tried to discredit international health guidelines advising people to eat less sugar. That study, which also appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, or ILSI, an industry trade group largely supported by agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical companies and whose members have included McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cargill, one of the largest beef processors in North America.

I think this is enough for me to disregard that individual and anything he says about nutrition. If you want to eat processed meat go ahead and eat it. You can convince yourself it's healthy too. You can convince yourself sugar is healthy.

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#12

Post by PunchTornado »

brodouevencode wrote: post #4

This smells like a non-story. There’s just not enough there.

really? to me it looks like he's a crook after reading it.

> When Dr. Johnston and his colleagues first published the sugar study, they said that ILSI had no direct role in conducting the research other than providing funding, but later amended their disclosure statement in the Annals after The Associated Press obtained emails showing that ILSI had “reviewed” and “approved” the study’s protocol.

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#13

Post by [deleted] »

brokenkebab wrote: post #10
elif wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a seatbelt makes you 50% safer in the event of a potentially fatal crash, you wouldn't say "it's really a 4% difference because 8% of the population is involved in a potentially fatal accident" That is purposefully obfuscating the relevant data.

The wording you used for your example is purposely unwieldy, but even so it would be still logically valid. It's perfectly valid as well to say that it obfuscates a particular point you are trying to make. However, as humans tend to have different priorities, and values a wording you prefer may be validly presented as obfuscating points other people see as more important.

[deleted]

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#14

Post by elif »

brokenkebab wrote: post #10
elif wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a seatbelt makes you 50% safer in the event of a potentially fatal crash, you wouldn't say "it's really a 4% difference because 8% of the population is involved in a potentially fatal accident" That is purposefully obfuscating the relevant data.

The wording you used for your example is purposely unwieldy, but even so it would be still logically valid. It's perfectly valid as well to say that it obfuscates a particular point you are trying to make. However, as humans tend to have different priorities, and values a wording you prefer may be validly presented as obfuscating points other people see as more important.

It is a perfectly reasonable example. Both are individual decisions one makes for individual safety considerations. Introducing society-wide multipliers makes it harder for an individual to make decisions based upon the data. When I get in a car, I am not buckling up for society. When I invest food, I am not making a decision for society.

Unless you believe the primary function of this research is to inform policy decisions which have little to no effect, and not consumers, who have a very direct effect?

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#15

Post by DanBC »

elif wrote: post #14
brokenkebab wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wording you used for your example is purposely unwieldy, but even so it would be still logically valid. It's perfectly valid as well to say that it obfuscates a particular point you are trying to make. However, as humans tend to have different priorities, and values a wording you prefer may be validly presented as obfuscating points other people see as more important.

It is a perfectly reasonable example. Both are individual decisions one makes for individual safety considerations. Introducing society-wide multipliers makes it harder for an individual to make decisions based upon the data. When I get in a car, I am not buckling up for society. When I invest food, I am not making a decision for society. Unless you believe the primary function of this research is to inform policy de…

Risk does need to be presented both ways - relative and absilute - for anyone to make any sense of it though.

People see 50% increase in risk and don't have enough information to make an informed choice. If you tell them that we go from 2 people in a thousand suffering ill effects to 3 people in a thousand they can make their choice.

See the work of Gerd Gigerenzer for plenty of examples of people caused harm because they were told only the relative risk.

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#16

Post by elif »

DanBC wrote: post #15
elif wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a perfectly reasonable example. Both are individual decisions one makes for individual safety considerations. Introducing society-wide multipliers makes it harder for an individual to make decisions based upon the data. When I get in a car, I am not buckling up for society. When I invest food, I am not making a decision for society. Unless you believe the primary function of this research is to inform policy de…

Risk does need to be presented both ways - relative and absilute - for anyone to make any sense of it though. People see 50% increase in risk and don't have enough information to make an informed choice. If you tell them that we go from 2 people in a thousand suffering ill effects to 3 people in a thousand they can make their choice. See the work of Gerd Gigerenzer for plenty of examples of people caused harm because…

But in this case, the extra variable adds weird implications that are simply not true...

For instance, if half of the population became vegetarians, the rate of colorectal cancer would go down, and red meat would become even more "safe."

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#17

Post by wpietri »

L0stRegulator wrote: post #5
brodouevencode wrote: post #4

This smells like a non-story. There’s just not enough there.

Agreed. Seems like an ad-hominem. There is often a huge lag between funding, submission for publication and final publication. His interpretation of the rules would be widely agreed upon as reasonable.

Would it? The point of reporting like that is to create reader confidence by disclosing any possible conflict of interest. Taking a narrow, technically-correct interpretation of the rule, rather than a bend-over-backwards approach is a bad way to do that.

Also, your "huge lag" point is a strong argument in favor of disclosing. That suggests funding relationships have a more lasting effect.

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#18

Post by bobcostas55 »

denzil_correa wrote: post #6
taylodl wrote: post #2

Dr. Johnston said the real problem is that people don’t want to accept findings that contradict long-held views. “People have very strong opinions,” he said. “Scientists should have intellectual curiosity and be open to challenges to their data. Science is about debate, not about digging your heels in.” There's a vast difference between not having intellectual curiosity and not wanting to deal with cranks. Dr. Johnst…

There's a quote from the original NYT article that I found interesting. > “It is important to recognize that this group reviewed the evidence and found the same risk from red and processed meat as have other experts,” she said in a statement. “So they’re not saying meat is less risky; they’re saying the risk that everyone agrees on is acceptable for individuals. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-hear…

I don't think that's an accurate summary of the research. One key aspect of their review is that they don't give much weight to (blatantly confounded) correlational studies. Looking at RCTs that "same risk" is tiny and not statistically significant. For example, looking at all-cause mortality, correlational studies find a hazard ratio of .93, while RCTs find a hazard ratio of .99.

They are definitely saying meat is less risky.

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#19

Post by mindfulplay »

First off, these diet studies are not science. It's a lot of drama and PR push by so-called "scientists", it's a bit sickening to see this crap play out.

Observational studies on diets or food intake are useless to draw conclusions that are then plastered all over Daily Mail and so on: people actually read this shit seriously.and it affects people's lives. All based on shoddy, PR-centric "science". I would actually want to see something like "dietfraudwatch" that shames these researchers who don't have high standards to begin with.

Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

#20

Post by sbooher »

If there is any information domain were it’s harder to figure out the real truth than current US politics, it’s “nutrition science”. As someone who actually tries to invest the time to check on sources and methods beyond the clickbait headlines, it’s really a mess. Poor scientific methods (observational studies), cherry-picking data to match a bias (Ancel Keys), conflicts of interest all over the place, etc. At a very macro level it seems like a few things are true: (a) 300,000 years of human evolution eating meat; (b) per-capita leveling off or even a drop in consumption of red meat, that didn’t stem the huge spikes in disease; and (c) being told to swap out good fats (meat, eggs, dairy) for industrial seed oils and ‘fat-free’ cookies to make up the calories, leading to an explosion of diabetes.

Fallacious arguments abound for the carnivore group all the way over to the militant vegans who would want to tax or outlaw meat eating altogether, while telling us to shut up and eat our processed patty of canola oil and isolated pea protein. For now, I’ll keep eating like my grandparents ate - you know, real food.

Post reply on HN