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The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

unsettledscience.substack.com

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Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#91

Post by 123409871234 »

The author of this post is not a scientist, but rather a journalist with no scientific credentials, who has a long history of being a promoter and propagandist for the meat industry:

"Meat lobby peddles doubt to undermine dietary guidelines

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, updated every five years, never fails to cause a stir. For the current revision, released in February, a federally appointed scientific committee — after a two-year review of the latest research and numerous public hearings — has recommended (PDF) lowering consumption of red meat and processed meat.

Despite being fairly tepid, this advice set off a media firestorm, driven by a defensive meat industry and others who have been muddying the waters for some time on the role of meat in the diet. The meat lobby is taking full advantage of the current “debate.”

Adding to the confusion is Nina Teicholz, the best-selling author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” whose recent attempts to discredit the committee’s recommendations on meat have been published in The New York Times, alongside meat industry trade publications such as Beef Magazine and Cattle Network."

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/5/meat-lobby-pedd...

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#92

Post by amusedcyclist »

pessimizer wrote: post #88
julkali wrote: post #84

This may be only tangentially relevant, but the author is known to be a pro-meat lobbyist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Teicholz ).

Could you pull the quote out that says she's a lobbyist? I can't find it, and without it I can't figure out if you're misusing lobbyist to mean "is known to have had this opinion before."

"She was also criticized for being an ally of the meat and dairy industry. ". She's not a scientist (did an "American Studies" degree in college,) just a dirtbag who makes her money shilling for a murderous industry

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#93

Post by eduction »

pessimizer wrote: post #88
julkali wrote: post #84

This may be only tangentially relevant, but the author is known to be a pro-meat lobbyist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Teicholz ).

Could you pull the quote out that says she's a lobbyist? I can't find it, and without it I can't figure out if you're misusing lobbyist to mean "is known to have had this opinion before."

Strong agree. “Lobbyist” has a precise legal meaning and they are required to register with the House and Senate if they are a federal lobbyist and each state has its own registration process if they are lobbyists at that level. It does not appear this person is a lobbyist. Holding an opinion is not enough to make you a lobbyist, nor is expressing that opinion in a published work.

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#95

Post by amusedcyclist »

eduction wrote: post #93
pessimizer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you pull the quote out that says she's a lobbyist? I can't find it, and without it I can't figure out if you're misusing lobbyist to mean "is known to have had this opinion before."

Strong agree. “Lobbyist” has a precise legal meaning and they are required to register with the House and Senate if they are a federal lobbyist and each state has its own registration process if they are lobbyists at that level. It does not appear this person is a lobbyist. Holding an opinion is not enough to make you a lobbyist, nor is expressing that opinion in a published work.

We're not in court. If someone clearly has an agenda then calling them a lobbyist is just fine

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#96

Post by vnorilo »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #3

I have often wondered: A - Are meats unhealthy, or, is it the food fed (grains on a foodlot) to the animal that negatively influences the health profile? [1] B - If meats are so unhealthy, why are the bushmen superfit and incredibly healthy into old age despite having a significant amount of meat ~25% in their diet? [2] & [3] I recognize that some animals raised on healthy grass-fed diets may have health profiles mor…

Regarding B, I had the pleasure of meeting a handful of San [1] elders to record some of their songs. I learned that some of them walked ~10km to meet with the rest of us and did not think much of it. In general their lifestyle is probably a lot less sedentary than mine.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#97

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

seibelj wrote: post #66
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

There's a lot of evidence that multivitamins don't actually do much: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/do-multivitamins-...

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#98

Post by mrandish »

em500 wrote: post #44
the_omegist wrote: post #29

Aren't most studies contradictory ? For one study claiming A you can find another claiming the opposite. In the 80s/90s there was this constant fear about cholesterol and eggs (perhaps promoted by the cereals lobby?) : did people's habits change? If yes, it was probably because of the monopoly of TV as the main source of "information". Nowadays with internet, every one follows his own little bubble of information.

Yup, according to studies, everything we eat both causes and prevents cancer[1]. AFAICT it's almost impossible to conduct convincing nutrition science. Even if the signs of the effect in observational studies are all in the same direction (usually they're not, see the reference), you still can't rule out many confounding effects. To demonstrate causality, you'd need to force a large number of people on specific diets…

Due to some fairly serious diet-related personal health issues (obesity and several related co-morbidities), 5 years ago I started closely following nutrition science. In this time, the clearest thing I've learned is that the vast majority of "Nutrition Science" is poor science - to the extent of hardly being science at all.

* If the data is based on diary data, it's noisy to the extent of being nearly useless and no causation can be implied.

* Doing rigorous controlled studies on humans is very difficult and astronomically expensive. Even then, it's incredibly easy for significant confounds and errors to slip in.

* With nutrition studies in general, animal models are usually weak proxies for humans. A large number of significant nutrition results in animals fail to replicate in humans.

* Humans metabolic responses to nutrition are highly variable and contingent on everything from genetic make-up and ethnicity to behavior and environment, etc. So, even in the rare cases statistical causation is demonstrated, it probably still depends on other variables.

* There is a high degree of bias in nutrition science. This includes many funding sources having vested interests from commercial (food lobbies (meat, wheat, milk, etc)) and many researchers having ideological biases (anti-meat vegetarians, anti-meat climate concerns, anti-meat animal welfare, etc)

* Accepting any result as significant requires skeptically examining the methods, statistics and history of the authors and funders.

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#99

Post by bfgoodrich »

amusedcyclist wrote: post #95
eduction wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong agree. “Lobbyist” has a precise legal meaning and they are required to register with the House and Senate if they are a federal lobbyist and each state has its own registration process if they are lobbyists at that level. It does not appear this person is a lobbyist. Holding an opinion is not enough to make you a lobbyist, nor is expressing that opinion in a published work.

We're not in court. If someone clearly has an agenda then calling them a lobbyist is just fine

No post body was provided.

Re: The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring

#100

Post by noSyncCloud »

amusedcyclist wrote: post #92
pessimizer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you pull the quote out that says she's a lobbyist? I can't find it, and without it I can't figure out if you're misusing lobbyist to mean "is known to have had this opinion before."

"She was also criticized for being an ally of the meat and dairy industry. ". She's not a scientist (did an "American Studies" degree in college,) just a dirtbag who makes her money shilling for a murderous industry

What on earth is an "American Studies" degree?
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