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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

#181

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

watwut wrote: post #166
perrygeo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But taken together (I believe the statement should be written with commas instead of periods) that sentence fully answers your question - what is eating correctly? mostly plants, minimally processed. If you do that, you'll have no trouble managing proportions.

It would be super easy to create malnutrition of some sort with this advice (anemia for instance). You might not even end up managing proportions - it is fairly easy to end up hungry and then binge on bread, nuts, dried fruits or whatever else if the diet don't contain what you need. The right composition of plants does matter great deal.

Why would you get anemia by following that advice?

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

#182

Post by endisneigh »

pessimizer wrote: post #125
endisneigh wrote: post #57

more diet silliness. look, this is the ultimate diet: - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Mostly unprocessed. Nutrition science has come up with so many contradictory conclusions in the past decades.

It's partially tautological. "Not too much" communicates no information, it might as well be "eat correctly."

Each person already intuits how much "too much" is. How else would anyone know when they're "full"?

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

#183

Post by Supermancho »

blackbear_ wrote: post #172
drno123 wrote: post #129

Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result. This will make PhD harder to get, so PhD’s will become more valuable (and more vetted), and we will have people verify published studies.

Why make it a PhD requirement? You'd end up with half-assed attempts to reproduce easy results and little mafia rings of my-reproduction-for-your-reproduction. Much better to make reproducibility a valuable research contribution in and of its own and let "the market" take care of it. Create better incentives for all authors. For example, make it possible to submit the code for analysis alongside an article and highli…

> Much better to make reproducibility a valuable research contribution in and of its own and let "the market" take care of it.

"the market" is the same force that has led to the perverse incentives of constantly pushing new "discoveries" above validations. The small variations you have prescribed have been tried (to various degrees) and have not had an effect on aggregate behavior.

> Why make it a PhD requirement? You'd end up with half-assed attempts to reproduce easy results and little mafia rings of my-reproduction-for-your-reproduction.

The why is obvious. The purpose of a PHD is for the furthering of knowledge, so it's a perpetual source of motivation.

> You'd end up with half-assed attempts to reproduce easy results and little mafia rings of my-reproduction-for-your-reproduction.

That's how it might end up (largely based on the rigor of the PHD program), but it's better than what we have, which is no good incentive to reproduce results.

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

#184

Post by cryptonector »

andy_ppp wrote: post #159

The classic problem with self reporting food questionnaires is recall of the correct information. If anyone here knows accurately how many cups of ribs they had in the last year, (unless zero) you might as well just invent a random number. I have no idea how you would even follow someone's diet closely enough to be even 50% accurate and for how long? Until someone is dead. Nobody is doing accurate research on this be…

I recently met several 'carnivores' who eat one to two pounds of meat every day, and only meat, dairy, fruit, honey, and water -- no other carbs, no sugar, no rice, no pasta, no bread, no wheat, no corn, no veggies(!) (apparently a lot of vegetables have something called "oxalates" and that's bad, though I know nothing about the topic), no alcohol, no nuts, no seeds, no seed oils, etc. They swear by it. I'd imagine that carnivores can probably estimate their red meat consumption very accurately, though I didn't ask the ones I met recently -- they were pretty sure of how much meat they eat each day, so I assume it's trivial to x365 to get "how much beef they had in the last year". Well, maybe not that trivial because some of them also have pork and chicken?

https://www.google.com/search?q=carnivore+groups

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

#185

Post by cryptonector »

mike_hearn wrote: post #134
WalterBright wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Politics and education are certainly factors, but I would argue that they are minor Are they? If your proposed project does not align with current politics, no funding for you.

From reading papers of various different types in the past few years it really depends a lot on the exact field in question. Nutrition? Would be surprising if there's much political distortion there but there's lots of really bad methodologies, partly because it's hard to get good data (people are bad at reliably writing down what they eat). Social bot/misinformation research? Basically just politics masquerading as…

Academia is pretty corrupt or corruptible (well, it's humans after all). If CS research isn't corrupted at the moment, it will be if it being corrupted becomes useful.

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

#186

Post by benjaminmaccini »

@dang, can we link the actual journal article[0] instead of the embellished advert to eat more red meat?

Also, generally, diet is political in nature and I don't see its place here on HN. Had this article focused on something else, like the replication crisis as it pertains to nutrition research (like some of the comments seem to think), instead of promoting specific dietary views, I could see a healthy discussion starting. However, as it stands, there is nothing in the comments that is related to the article and productive. This seems to be a common trend, I can email you a list of links, if you're interested.

---

For my own edification; some thoughts after reading the journal, the comments and some supplementary links. I'm trying not to put on a tinfoil hat and I could be missing the point on some of these.

- The author performs funded research by and holds shares in an agri-tech company with a focus on poultry and swine[1]. This isn't an immediate conflict of interest in my mind (food professionals are commonly hired by agribusinesses), but just glancing at her previous publications[2], it's hard to find her arguing against livestock consumption in any way.

- What exactly are the 'serious errors' mentioned, specific to red meat consumption? The article's primary concerns seems to be that the GBD 2019 risk factor analysis[3] a) Changes the TMREL (theoretical minimum risk exposure level) for risks to be 0 (this isn't just for red meat) b) Categorizes red meat as a risk factor in the first place c) Fails to match up with other systematic reviews put up by other research organizations. One organization mentioned, NutriRECS[4], has substantial ties to the meat industry[5]

- The article fails to mention the fact that GBD groups "dietary factors" into one when linking to death, AND that there was decrease in diet-related burdens[6]. I don't see anywhere that the GDP study says red meat definitively equals more death. It's mentioned as an increased risk factor, but not elaborated on. Additionally, I don't know where this article's authors got their "36-fold" increase from. Could someone help me find that?

- I'm confused more about what a quality diet should be after reading this piece. So, it seems as though the article is successful.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220710204451/https://us.deveni...

[2] https://www.rcsi.com/people/profile/astanton

[3] https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736...

[4] https://www.nutrirecs.com

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/07/youll-nev...

[6] Go to [3] section titled "Substantial changes compared with GBD 2017" (or just Ctrl-F for "red meat").

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

#187

Post by ibeckermayer »

librish wrote: post #123
crims0n wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but for different reasons... namely, our ancestors have lived off red meat for hundreds of thousands of years. We can still eat red meat our entire lives with minimal, or at the very least, hard to link direct consequences to our health. It can literally sustain a human for their entire lifespan - so asserting it is unhealthy should be an extremely high bar.

I don't understand this argument. Why does what our ancestors did mean it's either healthy or unhealthy? We know these things are not healthy or unhealthy enough to meaningfully affect reproduction so there shouldn't be an evolutionary argument.

Given how incredibly complex human health is, it’s no trivial task to identify precisely how/why some specific behavior is “healthy” or “unhealthy”. Given that predicament, our best guide is what our ancestors did, since it’s passed the test of evolutionary time to at least get us to our present moment. The burden of proof is on any reformer to demonstrate why his reform is better than the tradition.

In the case of something as ancient as meat eating, which is so fundamental to our species as to be reflected in our very physiology (teeth, digestive system), this is an extremely high bar.

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

#188

Post by watwut »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #181
watwut wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be super easy to create malnutrition of some sort with this advice (anemia for instance). You might not even end up managing proportions - it is fairly easy to end up hungry and then binge on bread, nuts, dried fruits or whatever else if the diet don't contain what you need. The right composition of plants does matter great deal.

Why would you get anemia by following that advice?

Cause you need to eat specific plants to NOT get anemia over time. If your choice of plants is pepper, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes, salad, potatoes, you get no iron.

You can eat plants and get enough iron (eat beans, also easy with meat), but it happens to be one condition I know about that most random dietary advice easily leads to.

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

#189

Post by kurthr »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #150
kurthr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that for any sufficiently complex or advanced research there are enough variables to contend with that there are 1000s of ways to get "no repeatable result" and only a few to actually replicate. Knowing which variables need to be controlled is part of the expertise, training, and lore. Knowing when those variables are getting out of control and how to fix them early (knowing which knob or often combina…

If you can't replicate that means the original research didn't document the conditions adequately.

The whole point is that some people CAN replicate, but not everyone can, because the documentation for real (interesting) experiments would be so complex for a layman that they would likely become confused and never finish. If I give you and your 20 best friends a $300M EUV machine with all the documentation in the world, the best thing you could do is sell it for $10M in parts. Give it to TSMC or Intel's experts and they will make $Bs in chips at 50% margins. YOU can't replicate the experiment. Most people can't replicate the experiment, and being unable to do so does NOT make you special. However, some people can replicate it many millions of times a year.

Who's results would you publish?

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

#190

Post by sweetheart »

trident5000 wrote: post #99
tecleandor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Protein is not all you get from meat. If you want to replace meat, fine. But dont act like its just a protein swap. For instance you're not getting creatine and all the amino acids from beans amongst other nutrition. I also dont really understand the full appeal as mono-cropping has devastated forests and animal species. And those harvesting machines kill many animals in the fields.

This is like a bingo card of bad arguments
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