I presume "red herring" is a joke?
A pun.
The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
71–80 of 152 posts
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likewise comparing ourselves to obligate carnivores, or obligate herbivores is also less useful. Ideally you'd want omnivores that for one reason or another excluded meat from the diet, or did not. Right?
Not really. The key question is whether meat is carcinogenic or not. If you eat less of it, sure it will be less carcinogenic, but it won't be suddenly good for you. There seems to be a lot of people who want to eat meat and also deny that it has various adverse health effects. The evidence is pretty clear, that's all I'm saying. What one does with that information is up to the individual. I don't do anything with it…
but you can't blanket say meat is carcinogenic. If we acknowledge that meat has no link to cancer in alligators or sharks, then we need to question if it is because of animal, the meat, or both. Likewise, if mountain lions have higher rates of cancer than deer, is it the animal or the food? Likewise deer are eating acorns which are very high in antioxidants. So its another variable. Do mountain lions have higher cancer rates than a wild hog? That is an interesting question. As far as my bias from what I want to do. I want to eat ice cream and drink scotch all day, but I won't argue either are healthy. Alcohol is generally listed second after tobacco as a cause for cancer in humans. I really just don't think the link between meat and health is well established in humans, or even if it is the same across human variation.
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big Pasta are in on the climate change hoax too? You cant trust anyone. I was going to quote this exact section, as I felt it was one of the few areas where they let their "we just want real science" mask slip and revealed their consistent "pro-meat" stance.
What's this got to do with climate change? I thought it was about diet and CVD.
The blog is a front for the meat industry. They try to stick to the areas where they can have vaguely plausible deniability that they're not just attacking everything that would impact meat sales and agriculture subsidies, with the cover that they're "wanting to look at the evidence". But the comment I replied to quotes them having a swipe at a challenge to meat from a non-nutrition angle, which tips their hand a little.
The whole, "we just want the science to be certain" thing is a popular tactic, see for example the Heartland Institute's attempt to have a "Red Team" of scientists pick holes in climate science:
https://climateinvestigations.org/heartland-institute-climat...
Wouldn't surprise me if you could trace this group back to them too.
Ha, didn't think it would be that easy:
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/follow-the-scien...
For those that prefer Youtube videos:
Is Nina Teicholz right about saturated fat or is she a lobbyist for the meat industry?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK5ApjZdPEo
lots of links in the description too.
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#74There never has and never will be a good stats-based study on human diet.
We are the most complex things we know of in the universe.
Confounding factors abound. Isolating one is impossible, unless researchers have access to a million identical twins separated at birth and forced to eat a certain diet all their lives, in which case there’s probably a huge human rights crisis going on… and the study would still be invalid because identical twins and authoritarian diet regimes are not the norm.
The only way is to map out the entire chemical pathway in the human body and figure out what is good and bad that way. That will take a very long time; in the meantime, I will eat red meat, butter, animal fat, and eggs like my very-long-lived and exceedingly robust ancestors all did.
One other approach might be to personally try a diet and get regular blood panels and heart scans done. I believe this is the best way.
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
10% reach 60. No numbers above that. They are healthy while alive, but don’t live longer than people from developed nations. Look, the discussions around bad health effects of meat consumption all resolve around heart disease and cancer. The numbers are pretty irrelevant for people below 60 or so. We are essentially optimizing lifespan and are wondering what causes diseases in old age, like 70+. It makes zero sense t…
> They are healthy while alive If that's true, it would imply that they don't die of ill health (disease) but of accidents (eaten by lion) or incredibly curable stuff (e.g. bacterial infection). So their lifestyle is definitely something to mimick / learn from, as we can easily prevent the healthy person dying causes of death in the first world.
No, that would imply they die of illness more quickly and sooner as well as of accidents. It does not have to be incredibly curable, all it needs if for better Healthcare making some difference.
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#76I am so sick of nutrition science.
Maybe in a couple of centuries it will deserve that description. In the meantime, it seems mostly to be data-illiterate or financially biased spreadsheet monkeys trying to prove things with n=10 and a host of confounding factors. It’s worse than psychology!
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#77It's far from one study that has found a link between red meat and heart disease. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=meat+heart+disease
Indeed. The original article comes across as really quite biased too. Longitudinal cohort studies can never nail causality but they are quite good at providing measures of apparent risk. In cardiology, an odds ratio of about 1.2, called tiny by the article, can actually be considered quite large in some circumstances. Very roughly speaking, it's about equivalent to your risk per ten years of age of developing heart f…
The point isn't that an odds ratio of 1.2 is too small to be important. It is that if the estimated odds ratio from the study, with all its biases, is 1.2, then one can't be at all sure that the actual odds ratio is even greater than 1. (An odds ratio less than 1 would indicate that red meat was protective, rather than a risk factor.)
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that study only look at zoo animals? I would assume carnivorous animals get far more exercise when they have to hunt, chase, and kill their food than when it’s given to them. That confounding factor alone might be large. I’ve been wondering about the relation between nutritional excess and cancer, can’t recall ever seeing this studied.
Yes, they are animals in human care. But the fact is there is a difference between carnivores and herbivores across various species and animal lifestyles, which is strong proof that meat is carcinogenic. What factors mitigate this in the wild are largely irrelevant. You can smoke and exercise and be a bit better off, but that doesn't change the carcinogenic potential of cigarettes.
> What factors mitigate this in the wild are largely irrelevant
Why? If we find a link indicating exercise reduces or eliminates the cancer risk associated with eating meat, then it would just show another option for behavioral change to produce positive outcome. More options is not a bad thing.
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are meats unhealthy, or, is it the food fed (grains on a foodlot) to the animal that negatively influences the health profile? I think there's a difference between healthy food, okay food, and unhealthy food. Something ultra processed, high in sugar, and low in other macro and micro nutrients is probably unhealthy. I think "red meat" is unlikely to be very unhealthy - in the same way a Twinky is. But maybe pepperon…
The human body is poor at processing cellulose. You need a lot of plants to equal the nutrients from meat. You can do it, but a cheeseburger, a multivitamin, adequate sun, and good exercise is also a healthy lifestyle.
it seems weird that you would talk about supposed shortfalls of plant nutrition and then in the next sentence talk about cheeseburgers (who considers these healthy?) and multivitamins (which are not considered a substitute for proper nutrition[1][2])
1. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
2. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/do-multivitamins-work
Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
#80Unfortunately meat is clearly bad for you in at least one but probably many ways. The most compelling evidence to me is that carnivorous animals have higher rates of death from cancer, see fig 2 of this fascinating study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04224-5
This is only a study of raw meat consumption, which is comparatively rare among humans. If it turns out — and this study acknowledges this limitation — that the predominant causal agent here is cancer-casing viruses, that would have pretty irrelevant impact for humans.
There are so many confounds here that it’s hard to draw conclusions for humans except maybe what’s worth future study.
FWIW, I have no horse in this race either.