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

There are many cultures with higher fat (French) and higher sodium (e.g. Japanese). So at least they can’t wholly explain the difference in health.

While sugar consumption is markedly higher in the US, I do believe that a good portion of the health outcomes can be explained by the total unwalkability of most of the US. If walking is part of the regular routine, you don’t need an app to hit 10,000 steps per day. But most Americans only walk the distance from the parking space to the front door on a daily basis.

> “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.”

It sounds to me like just more bullshit food nostalgia nonsense and you’re just perpetuating your own brand of unscientific nutrition opinion. Researching that a bunch of other hypotheses are wrong or partially wrong doesn’t mean your idea is right.

“Eating like my grandparents ate” for a lot of people in the US means a wildly lopsided diet of mostly meat and a slew of convenience foods foisted on consumers during the advent of mega supply chain processed foods. “Eating like my great grandparents ate” usually means “eat whatever you can and don’t complain” with no serious regard for nutrition or balance.

There are likely confounding effects in rate of disease, obesity, early death etc. due much more to lifestyle differences, general sources of pollution, sedentary habits, prevalence of jobs requiring hard physical work (where even the same job in the same company today is likely partly automated or handled differently to reduce physical labor), lack of good medical screening or testing in past generations obfuscating knowing true rates of disease or health problems due to diet back then, different structures for ensuring screening in schools, etc. The sheer volume of confounding effects that would have to be convincingly controlled for to compare causal impact of past generations’ diets is staggering. If we can’t even get good science on simple studies across cohorts today, it seems like a ludicrous stretch to claim universal positive causal effect from eating “like my grandparents ate.”

The tone of your last paragraph also makes it sound like you would not give credence to ideas of choosing food options that reduce water depletion or CO2 emissions, or even the philosophy of just animal welfare and cruelty in even small-time farming (not saying we know with great certainty what those choices or green impacts would be, only that you seem to have made up your mind that some Norman Rockwell Americana picture of green beans and chicken on the table represents The Right Choice).

If you don’t actually feel that way, you may want to consider writing more charitably and not invoking food nostalgia as the alternative to flawed modern nutrition science.

Hmmmm… The danger in the constant back and forth of poor nutrition science being hyped up in the media, reversing last week’s headline, is that eventually the general population just gives up, and stops listening/acting on ANYTHING coming from this expert group.

Those who want to drive food guidelines by other factors than actual health, should be honest about their motivations, whatever they are, rather than claiming that they are scientifically/health driven. Arguments for animal welfare, water use etc need to be backed by good science as well, not just platitudes. I’ve had people try to make the argument to me that all the water falling on all the pasture land in the US needs to be ‘counted against’ meat. That because we treat some animals poorly, we should stop eating all of them, rather than asking why we treat them that way, or how other countries might be doing it better. I’ve yet to see a good study on the millions/billions(?) of small animals that are killed in millions of acres of U.S. monocrops, but I’m guessing it would be eye opening. For every warning statement on animal CO2 use, I can find a seemingly well done study on positive CO2 capture by regenerative farms (i.e. traditional farms before feed lots). Carnivores on Twitter seem to have had amazing individual successes getting rid of their own specific inflammatory diseases, but then often assume that experience can be extrapolated to everyone, and often discount the long-term health impact of zeroing out plants completely…. It goes on and on.

Lastly, my statement about eating like my grandparents used the words “I” and “my” and was obviously my own rule - hard to imagine what you found ‘uncharitable’ about that statement. I’m somewhat new to HN - are we not allowed to share our own experiences here?

Mutant animal meat raised in factory farms fed soy and corn and shot with antibiotics and hormones is not real food either, and that is 99% of the meat dairy and eggs out there.

This is a straw man argument, because the perfect experiment will never be conducted. You would have to take 5000 people, put them in an island and feed them plant foods their whole life, collect blood and urine sample periodically to monitor them, wait for them to die and autopsy them.

Like we are doing with chimps currently literally. And we would need a control group. So because we can't conduct this perfect experiment, nothing in nutrition science has validity.

This is nonesense, its about gluing the pieces together. There are studies that show that certain populations are healthier than others, and we know what they eat.

There are studies that track population movement across the globe and their changes in health. Africans and Asians moving to the US and developing heart diesase and diabetes, when before they had none.

There are also studies that identify the mechanisms, we know certain molecules produced from the result of digesting meat that are carcinogenic.

So its the population studies, the observational studies, the studies of the action mechanisms all together that form a complete picture.

Would you be so kind as to cite some of those papers to which you refer?