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Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com

171–180 of 281 posts

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#171
post #67

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…

Food surveys and food diaries are hilariously bad[1]. I'm surprised any studies based on them are still getting published. There was literally a reality TV show in England based around how terribly inaccurate food diaries are. It's on YouTube[2]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4527547/figure/... [2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=secret+eaters

To further concur, when I was engineering my own body composition improvement plan I quickly learned to completely ignore any study that wasn’t performed in a controlled metabolic ward. Which is, essentially, a voluntary prison. Needless to say participant compensation is considerably more costly than the totally unscientific alternatives so such studies are rare.

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just replying to your last point: sugar and carbohydrates make you fat more than anything else. To fix that, most successful diets rely on increasing the ratio of protein you eat (wether it's fish, meat or poultry). It gets you to the same satiety but eating less carbs, and you lose weight. Now enter plant based / animal free diets, how are people gonna get to satiety without all that dense meat / fish / chicken? If…

> Now enter plant based / animal free diets, how are people gonna get to satiety without all that dense meat / fish / chicken? I thought vegetarians were famous for eating lots of beans and tofu. Is this no longer part of the stereotype?

The problem is that the most extreme plant-based dieters are the ones who get popular. So a vegan in popular culture's eyes is someone who eats 50 bananas a day.

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of "sometimes" or "not every day" is still "sometimes" and "not every day". People have no clue about how frequently they eat meat. Since vegan and vegetarian diet are gaining traction, everyone is pretending they're being careful and eating less meat than before, yet the global meat consumption is still increasing.

Global population and wealth are increasing. Meat is expensive. And price - we subsidise farming - is a direct way of influencing how often people eat something.

Multiplying taxes by 50 would indeed be a very convincing way of making people eat less meat.

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#175

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…

B12-deficient crowd here—not just mental health. The potential impact a lack of B12 can have on you physically is catastrophic.

I have to be mindful that I make myself eat a steak once in a while. On a regular day my skin lacks a lot of colour these days. If I forget to eat the right things I start to fog up, emotions waver, mood falters, and can even get clumsy. (Couple this with some latent pancreatic problems and it's worse)

The unfortunate thing about it, is it tends to progress even if you're making an effort unless you're making enough of an effort and it can be so creeping and insidious as to leave you unaware until you've done irreparable harm to yourself, either by diet or a physical defect.

Horrible stuff, this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559316/ (read: your body will more or less start falling apart)

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#176
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if factory farms reduce or disappear - animal welfare will get worse? I don't quite follow.

If they disappear, of course they won't be an issue anymore. But I'm assuming he means that with a reduced demand for meat, it would mean that factory farms are going to have to find ways to reduce costs. And they're already doing their best to operate at the bare minimum. So any cost cutting measures will come at the expense of animal welfare.

The point is - there really is no animal welfare in the factory farm industry.

We want the cheapest meat - don't care how. Caring for an animal's welfare is counter to that.

If demand for meat goes down it means environmental damage is reduced and fewer animals have to be born, which means fewer animals have to suffer.

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#177

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…

From the Austrian food survey study: > Our results revealed that a vegetarian diet is related to a lower BMI and less frequent alcohol consumption Wouldn't you say lower BMI is healthier?

The study was in Austria, not Australia.

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#178

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…

Just look to biology for the answers, its there if you pay attention.

The leader of a wolf pack gets first pickins at a kill, and it always eats the liver first.

Large carnivores elsewhere eat organs first as well.

There's a growing body of research for something that's being called the "carnivore" diet, and there's a sub-movement called "eating nose-to-tail" that seems to be, as best as I can tell, led by a physician named Dr. Paul Saladino, M.D., although the usual suspects are always on his podcast, or he's on theirs and/or associated with him: Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, Dr. Shawn Baker, M.D., etc.

Its basically exactly what you would expect... eating a lot of heart, liver, kidneys, along with skeletal muscle, etc.. I tried to do it, but I love things like french fries, roasted potatoes, roasted Brussel sprouts, etc. way too much. The biomarkers on this diet look amazing, but its always the same "problem". The people who are evangelical about eating this way are also huge into fitness, oftentimes spending an hour or more a day exercising.

I'd like to see 100 total lazy fatasses on a nose-to-tail carnivore diet and 100 total lazy fatasses on a vegetarian diet for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years, and do weekly workups on them... blood pressure, fasting glucose, post-prandial glucose, and so on.

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#179
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sugar does not contain cholesterol, but consuming an inappropriate amount of it will most certainly have a negative impact on your blood lipid profile.

Do you have a reference by chance? Would love to dig in a bit. I know that high sugar consumption raises triglycerides. But haven't seen anything yet on cholesterol.

A good start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid#Biosynthesis

Re: Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people

#180
post #139

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.

The gold standard to establish causation is the 2x blind random placebo-controlled study. There are many of them assessing various types of foods, from meat to lychee to soy and everything in between. Many biomarkers in the body can be studied such as stress hormones, markers of inflammation, lipid panels, arterial wall thickness, etc. If you poke around on youtube, you can find smart people presenting this research!…

The Mediterranean diet is only superficially close to the American one. It would be more accurate to speak of separate lifestyles than diets. The relationship to food that Americans have is almost completely alien to what most Italians experience, although with the spread of American culture this might not last beyond a few generations.

It's a bit like what used to be called the 'French paradox' in that American observers mistook a tradition of rich foods as the constant ingestion of such food.

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