Does Carnitine from Red Meat Cause Heart Disease?

http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/red-meat-and-heart-disease/

by sridca • 7 years ago

60 59 7 years ago

drilldrive3• 7 years ago

So are there any foods that are uncontroversially known to predispose people to heart attacks? It seems that just about everything is contentious in nutrition science these days.

DVassallo8• 7 years ago

Yes. Refined carbs, especially fructose. Unlike red meat which we've been eating for 200,000 years, we've only started eating refined carbs in large quantities for the last ~50 years.

tracker18• 7 years ago

Refined sugars and other highly inflammatory foods in general increase risk over time. Metabolic syndrome seems to be the biggest correlation to most disease. Most refined sugars are half or more Fructose and we get in general 30 times the amount of sugar on average today compared to 120 years ago. We also get far more refined grains, and refined vegetable (seed) oils.

High fructose intake in particular leads to a lot of disruption, although increased and continuous carbohydrate and intake of refined oils is seeing more evidence of being a large impact as well. Most of my reading the past couple years seems to indicate that minimizing overly refined foods in general and reducing snacking and increasing fasting cycles (intermittent and extended) are some of the better changes we (as a people) could make beyond sugar specifically and refined foods in general.

edit: note: the only organ that can really process fructose is the liver, and in quantities often consumed, the effect is worse than alcoholism.

drilldrive3• 7 years ago

Yes, I agree with you personally that refined foods are terrible for you long term, but is there an expert consensus on the issue? And I do not think there is a consensus on sugars in particular.

Regarding refined grains, do you have a take on house-hold breads? I mean, the breads are highly processed, and yet I do not know of an alternative for sandwiches and the like.

DenisM2• 7 years ago

Simple carbs are universally implicated in a lot of different problems, but I'm not sure about heart disease.

DVassallo8• 7 years ago

Homo sapiens has been eating red meat for 200,000 years. It is very unlikely it is net harmful to us.

AQuantized• 7 years ago

From an evolutionary perspective, all you can conclude from that is that it was unlikely to be a net detriment in the prevailing conditions of the vast majority of that time.

Heart disease in later life was unlikely to be a substantial downside compared with the nutrient and caloric density of the meal throughout most of human history. Now, with much easier access to a wide range of foods, and a much higher chance of surviving to be killed by heart disease, that may no longer be the case.

rovyko2• 7 years ago

This is a very good point that I see people miss quite often. Evolutionary pressure doesn't mean we adapt to optimize lifespan and health in our environment. The primary driver is the survivability of subsequent generations, not to reduce suffering.

tracker18• 7 years ago

Heart disease is happening in ages today that many people thousands of years ago were reaching. Excluding infant deaths, the biggest killer was infection. The correlation of most human illness is more strongly tied to metabolic syndrome than anything else. The driver for most inflammation is refined sugars, not red meat. Glycation of LDL cholesterol is what's happening as a result of ever increased blood glucose, this leads to not just repair of inflammation but plaquing.

rovyko2• 7 years ago

Interesting article, I was under the impression that the link between heart disease meat consumption was more strongly established. It's important to note that this article is from 2013, so I wonder how much has changed since.

Joe Rogan hosted a nice debate between two scientists in the field, one of whom was a strict vegan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULtqCBimr6U.

drilldrive3• 7 years ago

How is a layman supposed to differentiate between the author of this article and the authors of the studies done? I take it for granted that both sides consist of experts in the field, and yet the positions taken are radically different from one another.

I would assume a priori that the vegan side would be more widely supported amongst the experts (to say nothing of its merit), only on the basis of veganism being more congruent with the standard compassion of postmodernism.

tracker18• 7 years ago

Vegan/Vegetarianism is the driving differentiation in terms of opinion. Common sense sides more with the omnivore pov imho, but I don't hold it against individuals for choosing a vegetarian/vegan path.

DVassallo8• 7 years ago

The best way I found to acquire information is to see what passed the test of time. For example, if humans have been eating red meat for 200,000 years, it's very unlikely it is net harmful. It's still possible, but the burden of proof is on who thinks it's harmful. (And it better be very strong evidence.) Mother nature has a very good filter for harmful things.

porpoisely2• 7 years ago

A lot of health study regarding food is junk "science" because a lot of them are funded by companies, industry, special interest groups or charlatans trying make money by selling you a diet plan.

Everything from "fat is bad" or "cholesterol is bad" for you has been pretty much walked back.

And nonsense like "cereal or orange juice is part of a healthy breakfast" are "science" funded by the cereal and orange industries. It's marketing pretending to be a science.

Now the vegan charlatans selling their eating disorder to young and impressionable kids. The saddest part is that it is mostly young females falling for when they are at a critical stage of development. Almost all of them will leave veganism eventually but the curse of veganism will stay with them for the rest of their lives. In 30 years, we are going to have an epidemic of medical issues like osteoporosis, especially among women.

Balanced diet. It's simple. An omnivore diet that was part of ever human society.

sridca6• 7 years ago

Too bad sensible comments like these are getting downvoted at HN, which clearly indicates where this community's biases lie.

You may be interested in https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...

paulcole• 7 years ago

This is what’s so wonderful about nutrition.

There’s something for everyone! Just decide what you want to eat, search until you find evidence in favor of that diet, and then stop looking.

Svoka• 7 years ago

This person clearly has strong believe in "meat is healthy" and tries to find proof of that, and provides multiple links to healthy meat blog posts. I mean, with such attitude one can confirm anything.

But for some reason overwhelming majority of scientists claim that consuming meat in quantities we do in North America is not good for health and environment on multiple dimensions: cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, infections, kidney disease, liver disease, cattle waste, deforestation and many others.

HH & authors attitude towards this article really reminds me some cringe movements like anti-vaxers or some other shit, where people choose what they want first and then find confirmation for it.

jeremyw• 7 years ago

I appreciate the skepticism. But you might want to look at the foundational evidence for meat-causes-(bad thing) health claims. It's all incredibly weak and confounded, and would never be considered evidence in other fields.

markstos9• 7 years ago

Please provide any evidence for your claim.

markstos9• 7 years ago

The World Health Organization found processed meats to be carcinogens.

sridca6• 7 years ago

overwhelming majority of scientists claim that consuming meat in quantities we do in North America is not good for health

Does your skepticism (which by the way does not really disprove anything what the scientist who wrote this article says, and rather simply tries to discredit it) also extend to these "overwhelming majority of scientists"? Because if it did you will understand that nutrition epidemiology studies are not scientific experiments; they are wildly inaccurate, questionnaire-based guesses (hypotheses) about the possible connections between foods and diseases. This approach has been widely criticized as scientifically invalid [see here(1) and here(2)], yet continues to be used by influential researchers at prestigious institutions. Even if you think epidemiological methods are sound, at best they can only generate hypotheses that then need to be tested in clinical trials. Instead, these hypotheses are often prematurely trumpeted to the public as implicit fact in the form of media headlines, dietary guidelines, and well-placed commission reports like this one.

Tragically, more than 80%(3) of these guesses are later proved wrong in clinical trials. With a failure rate this high, nutrition epidemiologists would be better off flipping a coin to decide which foods cause human disease.

(1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2018.00105...

(2) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337

(3) https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...

Ref: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...

loceng• 7 years ago

Scientists/researchers in the past were paid by to say that sugar wasn't bad for you, and that fat was the culprit - we know this now to not be true.

There's research that emerging that is it's what you don't eat that - it's people who are eating meat + other bad things that causes problems and then allows the connection to meat as possibly being linked as the cause; there's barely any research of people just consuming meats and animal products.

Two videos I recommend everyone watch:

Dr. Georgia Ede - 'Our Descent into Madness: Modern Diets and the Global Mental Health Crisis' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlVfwJ6RQU

Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuj-oMN-Fk

Imaging meat is fine and it's when you hurt the body with other harmful foods that then causes your body to not function as well to process meat and other foods properly - and where other systems to clear/clean the body aren't or can't function optimally (think inflammation, insulin, excess of food/availability of calories, etc) - and not specifically because of the meat?

It's hard to know if oneself is ideology or propaganda, we've all been bombarded by things like government sponsored (influenced by food industrial complex) Food Pyramids, etc. our whole lives - or by fad diets looking to make money and marketing their own flavour of diet. The list goes on. Real research will happen that cuts through the confusion, people are waking up.

markstos9• 7 years ago

Recent Harvard research found that we need to replace beef and dairy to avoid climate catastrophe.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2018.1...

Harvard's finding is consistent with the drawdown.org research that found plant-rich diets are a top solution to climate change. (4th of 80).

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

arisAlexis• 7 years ago

This article is written in a very biased unscientific way and I wonder why it got so many upvotes. I get that people like meat here but.

markstos9• 7 years ago

What's one example where it is unscientific?

Does Carnitine from Red Meat Cause Heart Disease?

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