141–150 of 281 posts
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Fat stored in the body is the cause of heart disease, not fat consumption. Sugar is how you tell your body to store fat.
Sugar doesn't give you cholesterol. So how is cholesterol correlated to heart disease? Fat storage, is for sure related to becoming overweight and the cause of many ailments.
Almost all studies of this kind are extremely confounded because food survey data is close to universally bad. It is especially bad on this topic in the US and UK, because many people's idea of a serving of meat is actually closer to fried breaded bread, with condiment levels of meat on top. It would be crazy to lump those people in with the "steak and eggs for dinner 3 times a week" crowd, but they always are. Resul…
The bit about a vegetarian diet being associated with a higher incidence of cancer is kind of jarring to me. As I've always heard that leaning more towards whole/raw foods and more vegetables were better for avoiding cancer. Now that may be because of your top point, most of the meat consumed in the US is processed in some way. I think the biggest culprit of meat-related cancer (?) is preserved meats. I don't know. I…
I mean potato chips are vegan. French fries are vegan, etc.
The key is whole foods. Unprocessed foods.
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You bring up the point that really pisses me off in these studies. They treat a mcdonalds big mac as the same quality of meat as a grass fed steak or free range chicken breast. While grain free and free range is always best, even commercially produced grain fed cooked healthy is miles better than mickey d chicken nuggets. Lumping all these together as "meat consumption" is incredibly misleading. Most of these anti me…
I've looked into a few of the studies you mention a while back because of personal interest. Most of the conclusions of large scale studies are not very solid and can often be dismissed with correlation is not causation. Your point is valid, but also very often popular health habits align with the view of what a healthy diet is in society. Therefore lower meat intake often is connected to more exercise, more sleep et…
The biggest problem, most people in the modern 1st world are lazy af. No change in diet is truly going to fix the lack of movement and lack of sun exposure. A 12 hour a day, everyday, call of duty gamer is equally unhealthy and useless whether herbivore, omnivore or carnivore in diet.
Almost all studies of this kind are extremely confounded because food survey data is close to universally bad. It is especially bad on this topic in the US and UK, because many people's idea of a serving of meat is actually closer to fried breaded bread, with condiment levels of meat on top. It would be crazy to lump those people in with the "steak and eggs for dinner 3 times a week" crowd, but they always are. Resul…
The bit about a vegetarian diet being associated with a higher incidence of cancer is kind of jarring to me. As I've always heard that leaning more towards whole/raw foods and more vegetables were better for avoiding cancer. Now that may be because of your top point, most of the meat consumed in the US is processed in some way. I think the biggest culprit of meat-related cancer (?) is preserved meats. I don't know. I…
Don't know if that's a representative sample of vegetarian/vegan population, but it's not unlikely the case. Hence, the link between the veg* diet and cancer is not hard to imagine.
The main issue with (a lot of) these research papers, other than having bad data to begin with, is the lack of control for other parameters: what exactly do those surveyed meat-eaters and vegetarians eat, and what their lifestyle choices are (e.g., vegetarians are generally more health-conscious, so they often exercise, don't smoke/drink as much, etc.).
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> Coincidentally, industrial food producers have discovered that it is cheaper and more profitable to sell ground up peas and plant oil as “meat”, water rinsed through oats as milk, etc. > The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives. I think you are looking for a conspiracy where there is none. Those newer alternative meat products are not the basis of a healthy plant-based diet - they are treats tha…
I would love to have the time to dig into those numbers, but for now I'm going to take the sources "Plant Based News" and "The Sentience Institute" with a big grain of salt.
"Of the 1,315,051 farms with livestock, 18 percent (237,821 farms) were farms with confined livestock types (i.e., farms with 4 or more animal units of any combination of fattened cattle, milk cows, swine, chickens and turkeys, or appeared to be raising veal or heifers in confinement). These 237,821 farms accounted for $79 billion in gross livestock sales, which was 80 percent of gross livestock sales for all farms."
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/?cid=nrcs14...
I'm just gonna say it: epidemiological studies suck and we need something better. Humans and their lives are just too multi-variate, even with nearly ~500k people in a study. All you end up with are correlations – I've basically never seen a study like this that manages to demonstrate causality convincingly.
He was curious as to whether these groups of people, known to live a long time and even be healthy in their old age, had anything in common.
And they did.
They all exercised a lot.
They all had very strong social and community connections.
The all ate a mostly-vegan diet, punctuated with small amounts of animal product (in quantities varying from a portion every few weeks, to a few times a week but for only a couple of months of the year - for seasonal reasons).
He attempted to also prove, that taking any one of the above three commonalities away, was enough to invalid the results.
It's an interesting book, for sure.
Unfortunately, it has the terrible, baity title of: "Healthy At 100", and an even worse sub-title I won't repeat. But other than that mis-step (possibly at the hands of a publishing company), it's a good, well-referenced read.
Almost all studies of this kind are extremely confounded because food survey data is close to universally bad. It is especially bad on this topic in the US and UK, because many people's idea of a serving of meat is actually closer to fried breaded bread, with condiment levels of meat on top. It would be crazy to lump those people in with the "steak and eggs for dinner 3 times a week" crowd, but they always are. Resul…
> Despite the media headlines, the results from this Austrian cross sectional survey provide no proof that vegetarians are in poorer health than meat eaters.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200427104728/https://www.nhs.u...
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The study’s funding is included in the study: Funding This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, Our Planet Our Health (Livestock, Environment and People - LEAP) [grant number 205212/Z/16/Z]; Cancer Research UK [grant numbers C8211/A19170 and C8211/A29017]; and the UK Medical Research Council [grant number MR/M012190/1]. AP-C is supported by a Cancer Research UK Population Research Fellowship [grant number C60192…
In fairness, he's not far off. The Wellcome Trust was established by a pharmaceutical magnate and is the fourth-richest charitable organization in the world, with an endowment of ~$40bn.
I'm not sure whether Wellcome has a similar real or perceived conflict of interest. I did think it was interesting that they showed a lower instance of Afib and varicose veins across the meat eaters...
Almost all studies of this kind are extremely confounded because food survey data is close to universally bad. It is especially bad on this topic in the US and UK, because many people's idea of a serving of meat is actually closer to fried breaded bread, with condiment levels of meat on top. It would be crazy to lump those people in with the "steak and eggs for dinner 3 times a week" crowd, but they always are. Resul…
Thanks for the info. It is apparent to me from living life that meat is a big part of a healthy diet. But it can be frustrating seeing studies such as this one come out and not knowing what to believe. I recently started dating a vegetarian and am really realizing how much harder it is to eat a healthy vegetarian diet. Since no one actually wants to eat nothing but greens / veggies all day, many of her meals are carb…
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Studies like this are published for political reasons, not scientific reasons. I wouldn't be surprised if the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is behind this study.
The study’s funding is included in the study: Funding This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, Our Planet Our Health (Livestock, Environment and People - LEAP) [grant number 205212/Z/16/Z]; Cancer Research UK [grant numbers C8211/A19170 and C8211/A29017]; and the UK Medical Research Council [grant number MR/M012190/1]. AP-C is supported by a Cancer Research UK Population Research Fellowship [grant number C60192…
They also have a brief explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGpjeyypKMU&feature=emb_logo
I'm not going to call this a nefarious conspiracy, but in the same way you might wonder about a study funded by Coca Cola, LEAP doesn't sound like they'd want to fund a study concluding "eating beef is much healthier than soy protein"
If you combine that with the original criticism about the poor study design, you can come to your own conclusions about whether to reduce your meat consumption.