The key argument of the authors, it seemed to me, was that because there is only low quality evidence (e.g. correlative) for the benefits of reducing meat consumption. Thus, there isn't evidence to suggest that meat is bad. This doesn't mean that there won't be overhwelming, high quality evidence in the future. One of the authors, in an interview with The Economist, countered this point, however, saying that it is ex…
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Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties
61–67 of 67 posts
Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties
#62Key findings are here - https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD At a 5% significance level, the hazard ratios posted there are clearly not significant. Most of them are reasonably close to 1.0 - so there is basically no difference in mortality between the control & treatment arm. Sample size is very large, n=48000. The data he used is public & verifiable, so am not sure what digging into this person's private life has to do. Whether…
Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's technically correct but it misses the whole picture. For an extreme example--it's a lot easier to gain weight if you regularly stop by the convience store and pick up cookies, chips and a bottle of coke for dinner than if you cook lean chicken and roast vegetables. Sure you could eat a similar calorie portion of both.
The more common scenario is for the cookies, chips and coke to come from the respective aisle-long displays at the supermarket. Ready to eat frozen meals tend to be high calorie as well. As for eating out, fast food is bad, but fast casual is worse. All you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster, the pasta cabonara with chicken at Cheesecake Factory (~2300 calories) and your personal pie at the pizza place put on more weight…
I'm not sure I see the point here?
>Ready to eat frozen meals tend to be high calorie as well.
They can be, but I wouldn't say they tend to be high calorie. Most of the cheaper frozen dinners tend to be somewhere around 500 calories. Only the larger, more expensive, higher calorie dinners tend to get near 1,000 calories.
>As for eating out, fast food is bad, but fast casual is worse.
Fast casual doesn't mean Red Lobster or The Cheesecake Factory. Chipotle, and Panera Bread are examples of fast casual restaurants.
All you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster, the pasta cabonara with chicken at Cheesecake Factory (~2300 calories) and your personal pie at the pizza place put on more weight than convenience store snacks. Plus a few beers or glasses of wine, a margarita or two -- pretty soon it adds up.
For all but the pizza place your getting close to $100 meals there. The number of people who are eating like that regularly enough for that to be the primary cause of them being overweight is relatively small. And when you consider that obesity is negatively correlated with income, I don't think those restaurants are having a huge impact here.
As for a personal pan pizza. A pepperoni personal pan pizza at Pizza hut is only ~600 calories, that's less than a burger and fries at pretty much any fast food restaurant.
Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties
#64If there is any information domain were it’s harder to figure out the real truth than current US politics, it’s “nutrition science”. As someone who actually tries to invest the time to check on sources and methods beyond the clickbait headlines, it’s really a mess. Poor scientific methods (observational studies), cherry-picking data to match a bias (Ancel Keys), conflicts of interest all over the place, etc. At a ver…
One little problem with that is that your grandparents probably didn't eat what my grandparents ate. I'm guessing you're from a majority English-speaking country, the US, or UK, etc. I'm Greek. Our traditional cuisine is choke-full of strictly vegan dishes that are absolute staples [1]. Only of course no Greek would dream of calling those dishes "vegan". They are simply "food". And, I dare say, they are "real" food, the kind of food that grandma would make, as opposed to the stuff one can find in fast food joints etc.
The same goes for the "300,000 years of human evolution eating meat". Considering how far and wide humans have ranged during our evolution, figuring out what an average human ate would be very tricky. On the one hand, you have the diets of the peoples of the Arctic who eat predominantly meat from seals and caribou and the like. On the other hand, you have the diets of people in the Indian subcontinent who eat mostly pulses.
The bottom line is we've always been omnivores and we cant eat only meat any more than we can eat only plants. And we can't look at the plates of a few million people who have settled down in one part of the world and ignore the rest, who live all over the rest of the planet.
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[1] Rather than me giving a list of Greek cuisine dishes with no meat or animal fasts etc in them, here's a blog post by a vegan touring Greek:
https://www.thenomadicvegan.com/the-nomadic-vegans-guide-to-...
The list includes spanakopita and xoriatiki (Greek salad) that are normally prepared or served with feta cheese as are many of the other dishes. Greek cuisine is not vegan, but a lot of it is lacto- ovo- pescaterian.
Note again that the dishes in the list above are staples- the kind of dish the average Greek would eat a few times a year.
Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, even if he published a replicable study that was convincing, you'd toss it merely because of his affiliations? That seems like... a poor way to do science. Personally (I'm a PhD scientist in biology) I think a lot of the claims about sugar aren't actually supported by the evidence and are in fact just driven by super-egotist scientists who want peoeple to believe what they believe (lookin' at you, Lustig).
He didn't publish a replicable study, he just said the risk is acceptable.
Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties
#66> as recently as December 2016 he was the senior author on a similar study that tried to discredit international health guidelines advising people to eat less sugar. That study, which also appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, or ILSI, an industry trade group largely supported by agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical companies and whose members have in…
If the study were funded by vegan groups or environmental groups would it be more credible? Or course not.
Re: Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties
#67People believe whatever they want to believe and find a 'paper' or 'stat' to back it up.
In the end, a person should weigh out all the costs of a meat-heavy diet and consider the all the benefits of a plant-heavy diet. It's not even a debate for me.
I still allow myself to try unique food when I travel to fully experience a culture. I don't overdo it though, my body just feels different when I eat meat after getting used to life without it.