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'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#51

Post by colechristensen »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #44
gwerbret wrote: post #35

Of the lead author of this critical letter, the article says: "In her initial correspondence with The Lancet, Stanton declared that she was a part-time employee of Devenish Nutrition, an agricultural-technology and animal-feed company in which she also holds shares."

It is a conspiracy theory to associate commercial connections with scientific research and publications.

It's called a conflict of interest, and being worried about such conflicts is not paranoia, it is perfectly reasonable care. It adds quite a bit of doubt when the "truth" uncovered is particularly advantageous to the cause of the conflict.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#52

Post by sonthonax »

ravenstine wrote: post #17
narrator wrote: post #7

I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.

The standard of proof should be conducting actual science, not epidemiology or surveys. Epidemiology is good for some things, but as someone with an ongoing interest in health and especially metabolism, I don't believe epidemiology is very good at all for assessing what's optimal for human health unless the datapoints are overwhelming (ex. smokers have tar in their lungs that is rarely found in non smokers). Such evi…

> My opinion is that we should reconsider the ethics around researching nutrition, because it's been an overall failure

That just isn’t true. Advances in nutritional science have had a major impact. Vitamin C made transatlantic shipping empires far more viable. The discovery of folate eliminated a whole class of birth defects. Fluoride improved the oral health of nations. The whole reason that nutritional science has any credulity today is that it had an unequivocal positive effect on mankind’s quality of life at barely any cost.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#53

Post by pvaldes »

pvaldes wrote: post #37
mumblemumble wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics and education are certainly factors, but I would argue that they are minor. The bigger issue is the natural incentive structures that academia has created. If you want to have a career, you get both attention and funding in return for headline-grabbing results. This creates two huge second-order effects: first, everyone's incentivized to look for big impressive new effects. Second, focusing on confirmatory w…

If we assign grant points to people that flood the precious journal space with fake articles claiming over-hyped promises, maybe we should give grant points also to the people able to spot the lies on those kind of articles. After all they are serving to the advance of science also (and saving thousands of expensive hours of research to other). If you want to promote it, just create incentives. Otherwise, If the chea…

My proposal would be: If there was a clear, proven, intention of cheating and not just an error (we all commit stupid errors sometimes), the letter or communication of the people disclosing it will receive the same citation rank that the fake article had accumulated until that date. Good for the journals, good for the research.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#54

Post by rgrieselhuber »

colechristensen wrote: post #51
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a conspiracy theory to associate commercial connections with scientific research and publications.

It's called a conflict of interest, and being worried about such conflicts is not paranoia, it is perfectly reasonable care. It adds quite a bit of doubt when the "truth" uncovered is particularly advantageous to the cause of the conflict.

I agree, my comment was sarcasm because this principle is not universally applied.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#55

Post by tecleandor »

gruez wrote: post #47
gwerbret wrote: post #35

Of the lead author of this critical letter, the article says: "In her initial correspondence with The Lancet, Stanton declared that she was a part-time employee of Devenish Nutrition, an agricultural-technology and animal-feed company in which she also holds shares."

Should that matter much? Looking on their website it looks like they sell feeds for all sorts of animals, not just ones producing red meat. For most people, "not eating red meat" means eating pork/chicken not going vegan, so they don't stand to gain much from this study.

You'd be surprised to know that there are some other stuff holding proteins that's not meat. Like fish or chickpeas, or lentils, or beans, or seeds, or buts, or broccoli...

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#56

Post by kspacewalk2 »

davikr wrote: post #48
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a conspiracy theory to associate commercial connections with scientific research and publications.

It certainly is a conflict of interest which should be stated.

It was stated:

>In her initial correspondence with The Lancet, Stanton declared that she was a part-time employee of Devenish Nutrition, an agricultural-technology and animal-feed company in which she also holds shares.

>One of the co-authors of the open letter, Christopher Elliott, of Queen’s, declared grants to his research institute from Devenish.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#58

Post by PeterisP »

brigandish wrote: post #32
ravenstine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard of proof should be conducting actual science, not epidemiology or surveys. Epidemiology is good for some things, but as someone with an ongoing interest in health and especially metabolism, I don't believe epidemiology is very good at all for assessing what's optimal for human health unless the datapoints are overwhelming (ex. smokers have tar in their lungs that is rarely found in non smokers). Such evi…

> What meat eating has that other diets don't have is not just the phenotype of our digestive systems (being like that of other meat eaters), or archaeological evidence of our ancestors using sharp tools and arrows, but stable isotope testing of fossil evidence linking our recent ancestors to a substantial amount of meat eating for around 4 million years. How would that invalidate research showing, for example, a lin…

It's hard to clearly go from "a link between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat" to a causal statement.

Like, it's plausible that the red meat is causing these cancers. It's also plausible to have a different cause - e.g. if people's lifestyles lead to a correlation between consumption of red meat and smoking (for the sake of argument - I have no idea if there actually is one) then we would observe a link between lung cancer and the consumption of red meat without there being any causal relation.

It's also quite plausible that certain ways of preparing food is causing these cancers (e.g. nitrates in bacon, and known carcinogens from high temperature frying on pan or open flame), and we're seeing the effect because we're currently often preparing red meat in this way, but replacing the red meat with fish or vegetarian equivalent in the same fried dish would still have the same carcinogens, and thus the intervention would not get the expected results.

So, a correlation between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat is a good probable cause for an investigation of the causal relationships, but I'd be wary of using it to argue for major dietary changes - the last decades had far too many counterproductive dietary recommendations (e.g. regarding cholesterol) because of non-causal evidence leading into wrong assumptions.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#59

Post by bergenty »

dale_glass wrote: post #13
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

As the replication crisis grows, or we're simply becoming more aware of it, I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy. Much discussion has been had on what to do if it is the former but if it is the latter, what needs to change in the education process so studies are be…

Individual studies shouldn't be the primary focus. It shouldn't fall to every individual researcher to be fully accurate and honest. This is just not possible because people are imperfect, and have all the wrong incentives in many cases. What we need is a system designed to deal with this better. My suggestion would be greater incentives to the publication of negative results, and incentives to reproduce research. Cr…

In addition there needs to be tiers of publication that are purely objective. Maybe something along the lines of this paper was replicated by 3 different teams and the results hold up. Like a replication score or count- this would be desirable since then students could apply for funding to replicate papers.
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