'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/serious-errors-in-research-linking-deaths-to-red-meat-qtdh28fv5

by rgrieselhuber • 4 years ago

190 206 4 years ago

thetimes.co.uk

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 better designed to end up with errors so frequently?

cratermoon• 4 years ago

In this case I'm pretty sure that the research in question was about the same quality as the work produced by Tobacco Industry Research Committee or the Sugar Research Foundation.

pvaldes4• 4 years ago

what needs to change in the education process so studies are better designed

Remove politics, free kidnapped and gagged science.

dapf• 4 years ago

Remove politics

That needs the remotion of taxation. I agree.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

I think that's a separate issue that would not have affected this particular case.

seventytwo• 4 years ago

Politics is an emergent property of human interaction. It cannot be removed.

xhkkffbf• 4 years ago

That's just hard to do with a topic like this. There are committed people on both sides of the issue who know what they want to hear. That's not a good environment for science to find a neutral answer.

mumblemumble2• 4 years ago

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 work is a great way to tank your career. And those create a third order effect: people who cut corners thrive, and there's not much to keep that in check because people who cautiously vet their work and others' get stuck in adjunct professor hell until they finally give up and exit the field.

Politics just adds some spin onto that. Education, I just don't think that's even a possible solution. The math involved in some of these fancier statistical techniques can be devilishly hard to get right, and it's often simply asking too much to expect someone to be an expert at both that and molecular biology. You could argue that that means people should look for competent co-authors to cover that side of things. But, see above - current incentive structures don't really favor the researcher who says, "I know! Let's bring on some nerd whose only job is to find reasons why we shouldn't publish!"

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

I think it is not enough of a sense of quality and too much pressure or gamification of getting things published. And fundamentally lots of researchers need to be more interested in finding the truth and considerably better at statistics.

dale_glass• 4 years ago

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. Create a system that encourages reproduction as a second step to peer review. This should also increase quality. If your research can't be easily reproduced it's probably not doing a whole lot of good even if ultimately you got the right answers.

Test driven research, if you will.

jonhohle• 4 years ago

Or even requirements for replication amongst groups with separate funding sources.

If everyone needs replication for publishing, the incentive to replicate other’s work increases.

Tao3300• 4 years ago

It shouldn't fall to every individual researcher to be fully... honest.

Really? I don't know, "Don't be a fraud" might be a good Rule No. 1

FrenchAmerican• 4 years ago

Despite his dubious past, the billionaire John Arnold has focused time and money to amend scientific research. I've read maybe 2 years ago about that endeavor and followed him on Twitter ; I found it quite interesting and original. For example, he offers researchers to save their initial data (before any screening) so that other researchers can check which cases were thrown out of the study. He also funded reproduction tests. I haven't followed since, so I hope he kept on doing good work.

Enginerrrd• 4 years ago

Peronsally, IMO: you should submit methodology--including the data analysis and statistical tests you'll perform, to a journal before the study has been conducted. Then, they say yes or no and if yes you perform the study and as long as it is performed to the approved specifications, you get published.

bergenty• 4 years ago

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.

endtime3• 4 years ago

Prediction markets are an interesting alternative solution. If people can make money by correctly predicting the outcomes of experiments, and you have a way to prevent profit-driven bias impacting outcomes (e.g. independent experiment designers and performers, and the performers can't participate in the market but maybe get a cut of the transaction fees so that more "interesting" experiments get performed), then you get a pretty different research dynamic.

(I am paraphrasing Eliezer Yuskowsky here, specifically a small part of his NSFW and frankly weird collaborative fiction Mad Investor Chaos.)

kurthr2• 4 years ago

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 combination of knobs are required) is yet more expertise and experience. This is true in physics, chemistry, biology, and electronic design. Getting a null result really is often simply a failure to properly run the experiment... and as a scientist it would be very easy to follow any documented "recipe" and fail to get the proper result in hundreds of different ways. That does not make one a great scientist. You can't even tell me every way it could be screwed up. I can always come up with a new one!

Programming is such a wonderfully controlled environment, it's digital, replicable, and _almost_ math-like. You can know the variables. You can trivially replicate a program, or dig down into the OS... but every physical experiment out there has much more common and worse problems than Spectre or Rowhammer waiting to destroy it. It's the cosmic rays.

Your equipment/materials/specimens gets contaminated or reacts or ages. Your ultrapure water isn't. There's a vibration that changes everything. Your calibration sample changes. Cleaning staff used a new cleaner. The AC turned on. Build your experiment to be impervious to all of these and everything else I can't think of... or use the intelligence of an expert. Get there faster, cheaper, and find better ways of doing it along the way.

You'ld be right to say that it should all be documented, but the problem is that you basically need to be an expert to even understand the variables and to those experts many variables are so obvious to control they wouldn't think of doing otherwise. To give concrete and extremely valuable examples in manufacturing: EUV systems for lithography, OLED deposition and patterning, Lithium battery electrode forming. You can have the very best and exquisitely designed equipment for manufacture and yet without experienced experts running the process (replicating the experiment day in and day out) it will go out of control and you will get garbage in a million ways. It's like amateurs playing chess against a master... where the master is the natural variation of the environment.

High value semi manufacturing is a great example of how hard it is. The processes are designed to be as simple as possible to replicate. You replicate every day as many times as possible. You have huge amounts of money and resources to succeed and sometimes you still fail. Getting to 10% yield/replication is a big step... getting to 50% maybe harder... then 90%... and higher. Novel science is often harder and there's much less money and the time to replicate could be months/result rather than 1000s of testable results/min.

dc-programmer• 4 years ago

Personally this is one of the reasons I chose to go into software instead of statistics when I was a young math major. The idea that you could make a small mistake that invalidates all your work and you might not even know it until much later or even never always made me uncomfortable. With software I can write tests till my neuroticism has been placated

jefftk2• 4 years ago

If all the programmers who write tests go into industry and none of them go into academia, then the state of software in academia will be... oh, I see, the status quo.

jwond• 4 years ago

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.

I think we should also consider the possibility that some of it might be ideologically motivated.

For example someone who thinks people shouldn’t eat red meat due to climate change, animal rights, etc. (and who possibly belongs to a social circle where such beliefs are popular) might be motivated to fabricate results that could convince some people to eat less red meat (hypothetically, not saying that is the case here).

yboris2• 4 years ago

"Poorly aligned incentives" in the nutritional sciences is, as far as I can tell, mostly various food lobbies getting their product to look good.

The reason there is "confusion" about whether many animal products are good or bad is because the corporations making billions of dollars off the product fund biased research.

Consider looking at the research digests from a non-profit (that sells no products, has no ads, etc) focusing on improving your health: https://nutritionfacts.org/

netmonk3• 4 years ago

How a non-profit pays for hosting website cost, writing report, and so on and so on… being a non-profit doesn’t mean you are tied to corporations and free of any conflict of interest. If you start looking carefully you will see that most non-profit org aren’t unbiased and honest. And since long time…

For instance this whole vegan trend is based on some radical religious opinion to control fertility and lower class reproduction by promoting a hormonal dysfonctionnal diet. All those from “official scientific paper” written by those religious fanatic few decades ago.

contravariant3• 4 years ago

It has probably been a mistake to have so many articles that are effectively "We measured A and its value suggests the following theory" rather than "To test theory B we measured A and found it did(n't) agree"

I reckon that lack of a good theory is the by far best predictor for non-replicable results.

pca0061322• 4 years ago

I think there are several issues with this. In these fields, theories (not so fundamental ones) may not be very useful, in contrast with fields like Mathematics or Physics where a hypothesis may lead to a lot of other theoretical results. For example, if material A has property X, there will be a lot of applications for it, but this hypothesis cannot be used as a foundation for other theoretical research. As a result, it is not useful to just state a hypothesis: you have to verify it as well, and negative results are not really valued because it means nothing to others if you rejected something they don't care about.

mammuth• 4 years ago

I think this problem even has a name: HARKing - Hypothesis After Results Known.

One way to mitigate it is to pre-register studies as it's done in some areas like clinical studies.

derbOac• 4 years ago

You're framing this as if they're mutually exclusive options, which they're not. My impression is that it's "all of the above": the incentive structure in academics is completely broken, and this incentivizes both unethical practices, as well as being sloppy "to get things done".

I can think of numerous examples of both from my career, from working with various colleagues and in stories I've heard. All of this is the tip of the iceberg I think: what you hear about usually are cases of blatant fraud, with high-profile or high-importance research. The bulk of greyer malpractice, with softer squishier levels of ethical dubiousness, and more indirect, cumulative impacts on peoples' careers and literature trajectories, are more hidden.

It's gotten to the point where I no longer put much stock in the reputation of individual researchers. Too many times I know in the best case there's an institution, or department, or subcommunity, or doctoral students or postdocs behind it, with who knows what sort of manipulation or luck. In the worst case there's years of fraud or other forms of corruption. Call me inappropriately cynical but I didn't start out this way.

narrator• 4 years ago

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.

gpt5• 4 years ago

You could make the same argument about a study that says that meat is good.

GenerocUsername• 4 years ago

Except that eating meat is a common activity globally for all of human history...

It would be like publishing a paper that says walking upright is harmful and then people start crab walking. Like yes you can explain many back problems with walking upright, but does that actually justify a different form of walking?

crims0n• 4 years ago

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.

ravenstine3• 4 years ago

Not even just hundreds of thousands, but millions. At least 2.6 million, and possibly as far back as 4.5 million.

But yes, with the data being in favor of humans being meat eaters, absent any potential health consequences from such a diet (not that I personally believe there are), the science should be far more rigorous. Actually, much of it isn't science, because epidemiology is not a science any more than "computer science."

In case, if anyone here this wants some reading material, or to consider that the case against meat is anything but clear:

Behavioral Characteristics and Self-Reported Health Status among 2029 Adults Consuming a “Carnivore Diet”

https://academic.oup.com/cdn/article/5/12/nzab133/6415894

^^ To be clear, I consider this kind of research as dubious as similar studies both refuting carnivory or supporting plant-based diets. What it does do is counter the idea that humans aren't supposed to eat meat on the same level as the evidence used to support that claim.

Why Humans Eat Meat

https://www.history.com/news/why-humans-eat-meat

For 2 Million Years, Humans Ate Meat And Little Else

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate...

Exceptionally high δ15N values in collagen single amino acids confirm Neandertals as high-trophic level carnivores

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6421459/

Stable isotope dietary analysis of the Tianyuan 1 early modern human

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706269/

Evolutionary basis for the human diet: consequences for human health

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733113/

Comparative Digestive Physiology

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458075/

librish2• 4 years ago

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.

ravenstine3• 4 years ago

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 evidence doesn't present itself against meat eating, nor dietary cholesterol or saturated fat. To assume that the science is settled for any one of those things in isolation is a display of ignorance of the highest order. Though they can be debated, as can anything.

But we're unlikely to see better scientific research because there's ethical problems around keeping people behind forcing people to eat specific foods and keeping them behind lock and key for observation, and so they don't eat a single gram of anything outside the boundaries of the study. Unless more of such research can be carried out, too much of what we do is uncontrolled to make meaningful observations about what's unhealthy and what's not.

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. If you compare that to the amount of time we've had agriculture, ~30k years, the time in which we've been subsisting not only on more plants but plants selectively bred to be more nutritious than they were in the wild is a flash in the pan.

My opinion is that we should reconsider the ethics around researching nutrition, because it's been an overall failure, and has probably harmed more people than would scientific studies. This isn't to say that ethics in science should be abolished, but relying on the mouse model and epidemiology doesn't appear to be doing the most good.

brigandish3• 4 years ago

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 link between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat? That some behaviour produces a competitive advantage at one time does not mean it comes without risk, nor that newer behaviours aren't better in some or even all ways, nor that it would remain advantageous for all time.

sonthonax2• 4 years ago

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.

mattgperry• 4 years ago

The inverse is probably more true, being the animal industry is extraordinarily well funded and established?

z9znz7• 4 years ago

so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists

Forgive me if I fell for deadpan sarcasm... but you're joking, right?

Commercial organizations who make money from the sale of environment (natural resources, such as petrolium, animals, crops) have orders of magnitude more money to spend to fund research than organizations which seek to protect those resources.

speeder• 4 years ago

Crop-based corporations and Animal-based corporations tend to NOT be on same side.

This is ancient as the bible (the first murder, when the crop farmer murdered the animal farmer).

For example, one thing we now know, is that Coca-Cola (a crop-based company) bribed scientists to blame the obesity crisis on meat, and deflect it away from its own products.

So no, that person is not joking, animal rights activists are not fighting big-corpo only, they are ALSO helping big-corpo, they are just pawns in a chessboard that is too big for many of them realize they are pawns.

sonthonax2• 4 years ago

There’s plenty of money and plenty of ideological conviction to produce negative papers on animal products. It’s not like it’s a hard battle of numbers where the winner takes all in the battle for public opinion.

samloveshummus• 4 years ago

Meat is a $2 trillion industry globally but you're primarily worried about the corrupting influence of activists' donations?

mbostleman• 4 years ago

Where there is a large industry, there is a large anti-industry. To me, the point is that there is a large potential for bias in either direction so incentives to reproduce, validate, and otherwise test results need to be found and somehow added to the process. I would say that despite the size of this industry, this particular issue is the tip of the iceberg when you consider all the industries that have a significant impact on humans.

kcplate4• 4 years ago

It’s the nexus between activist funding, friendly media channels, and the social promotion due to like minded folks interested in pressing a specific agenda that often causes some bad science and studies to leak out.

Goes both ways of course.

andreareina• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/20220831193814/https://www.thetimes.co.uk...

TrispusAttucks• 4 years ago

When science becomes driven by political agendas it ceases to be science.

gruez4• 4 years ago

What's the political agenda behind eating more/less red meat?

YetAnotherNick2• 4 years ago

Climate change

TheRealPomax3• 4 years ago

No, it doesn't. That's the kind of attitude that ignores perfectly good science that proves something you don't like just because you didn't like the authors or what they stand for.

What drives the science is irrelevant in the question of whether it's still science. As long as the data and methodology are sound, science was done. It's when either or both are compromised in order to make false claims that something ceases to be science.

goethes_kind3• 4 years ago

If that was true there would not be any need to declare funding. Let's be real, everyone is funding their own agenda. If some scientist finds some effect that helps a corp or an activist group further their own mission, they get funding.

The finding might still be totally valid, but the visibility of the science and in particular the visibility of the science to the right people (legislators) can still be influenced by agenda driven entities.

gwerbret• 4 years ago

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."

rgrieselhuber3• 4 years ago

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

davikr• 4 years ago

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

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

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.

gruez4• 4 years ago

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.

tecleandor• 4 years ago

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...

contravariant3• 4 years ago

It wouldn't surprise me if beef turned out to requires significantly more feed per kilogram.

ma2rten• 4 years ago

Going vegan and eating different types of eat are not the only options, many people these days choose to eat less meat for health reasons.

jimmygrapes• 4 years ago

To me this suggests there is some motivation to do research on the subject, compared to someone who has no interest in the topic. At least disclosure of potential bias was acknowledged up front.

naasking2• 4 years ago

To me this suggests there is some motivation to do research on the subject, compared to someone who has no interest in the topic.

Research isn't done by people who have no interest in a topic.

verisimi• 4 years ago

Yes, unacceptable.

Would you agree that that it is also a conflict of interest if you are head of a scientific establishment in charge of making decisions that impact millions, and that the person responsible for judging the ethical dimensions of your actions, is your wife?

cough Fauci cough

endisneigh2• 4 years ago

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.

Silverback_VII• 4 years ago

Why not start eating humans ? this would solve many issues at the same time. More nutritious and ecological than eating plants I suppose.

jefftk2• 4 years ago

The world death rate is about 8 per 1000 people per year. If there are 50 pounds of edible meat on a body, then human deaths could supply 0.001 pounds per living person. This is also low-quality gamy meat because the average age of death among people is incredibly high for meat animals. Enacting worldwide cannibalism for humans would provide as much additional meat as spending one tenth of a cent per person annually on conventional low-end meat.

Not worth the social debate or the medical risk.

swarnie• 4 years ago

Since the median age of death is 82 (78 if free), riddled with an entire pharmacy of modern medicine i suspect that's a very, very unhealthy proposition.

May as well eat roadkill.

Shorel• 4 years ago

A modest proposal

spacephysics• 4 years ago

I’d even debate mostly plants part.

I’m heavily biased due to abiding many plants and focusing on meats resolving much of my auto immune issues, but even something as simple as the above isn’t fully accurate.

In my non-scientific, subjective take, I think we’d find more evidence looking into genetic/ancestral links to diets. I know it’s not a new thought, but it may give insights into why some people just handle meat or plants far better than others.

chasebank2• 4 years ago

I tend to agree, however, it does strike me as odd that when I went on carnivore diet for a couple months, it was the best I had ever felt in my life. First week was awesome, every week after that was a chore. It’s just really boring.

eska• 4 years ago

I also went carnivore for a few months. Second week sucked because my gut bacteria offed themselves and new ones took a week to develop. Then I could digest food properly again. Eating high quality meet and using different spices made it exciting enough for me. I’ve since added some salad and nuts back into the diet

throwaway2037• 4 years ago

This is a good post, and worthy of more study. My point: Your experience is both physical and mental. Both should be measured!

In some cultures, this diet is called "keto", which is basically a combo of low carb and high protein. How long did you last and what was the result?

dvh• 4 years ago

Are eggs healthy this year? I lost track...

goethes_kind3• 4 years ago

Do not forget variety as an important heuristic. The more variety the better.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

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

perrygeo• 4 years ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo04• 4 years ago

It makes perfect sense. Don't stuff your face every waking minute and don't eat until discomfort.

Have you ever eaten too much in one sitting?

endisneigh2• 4 years ago

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

m0llusk• 4 years ago

This is more that a flawed study, but a serious failing of comprehension. The assertion in more detail is that IGF-1 in meat causes illness at a predictable rate, but exercise causes large spikes in IGF-1 while being associated with a drop in cancer risk. Clearly the correlation between IGF-1 is not as simple as this study asserts.

valec• 4 years ago

IGF-1 is generally bad for longevity. Exercise is beneficial in spite of spiking IGF-1, not because of

drno123• 4 years ago

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.

metacritic12• 4 years ago

Great idea! Reproducing is also a great way to understand the field, and can actually help you a lot with your own research and techniques.

This also ensures the most famous results are the most replicated. Hugely valuable to society since the most famous results also drive the most thinking / decisions / policies.

eganist2• 4 years ago

Wow, I can't think of anything practically wrong with this.

I can think of plenty of reasons why it won't happen (notably the downward pressure on the candidate pipeline, which for a variety of reasons isn't an outcome research institutions don't want), but I'm wondering if the best place to apply the pressure would be the accreditation institutions and the Department of Education.

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

Might want a restriction like research from an unaffiliated institution / research group. I don't think reproducing results from someone in the same lab has much value.

watwut6• 4 years ago

One problem is that PhDs are already overworked and effectively taken advantage of. So, something would need to be removed from stuff they already do.

maze-le• 4 years ago

We (as a society) might start with assigning more value to reproduction in general. There is an implicit assumption that reproduction and verification (or falsification) of published results is somehow not worthy of time and attention.

logifail• 4 years ago

Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result

Speaking for my own PhD (now around 25 years ago): it's hard enough getting one's own damned work to reproduce, never mind the work of a complete stranger.

CodeSgt• 4 years ago

I think that's the point

taylorius• 4 years ago

If you can't reproduce it, that is also a valuable result.

_flux• 4 years ago

I'll one-up this idea!

So for each publication, you'd need to provide two serious attempts of reproducing other published results. You would make the reproductions yourself, but also anyone else could do them for you (here's where PhD students come in), but once used for a publication, they'd be "spent tokens". (No, I'm not going to even mention NFT. ..wait a minute, crap..)

From here it would follow that eventually all results would be reproduced (or failed to do so), until we eventually run out of results to reproduce and would need to shift the burden from two reproductions down to one—probably go from 2 to 1 in some stochastic manner. (Maybe also similar number of serious peer reviews of such reproductions would be required to keep the system running.)

Maybe we could make a new currency out of this. Actually, it sort of automatically does that by itself. I foresee no issues in this whatsover.

blackbear_• 4 years ago

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 highlight articles who do (similar to the open-access movement), create journals dedicated to reproducibility, measure successful reproduction attempts alongside citations of each article, etc.

Supermancho• 4 years ago

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.

RC_ITR• 4 years ago

There is no replication problem here. It's a matter of opinion, mostly. I'm assuming since the article is paywalled, most people aren't reading and instead applying their own biases.

The challenging researchers are simply implying that the original study did not account for the positive effects of red meat (vaguely 'vitamins and minerals).

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

"attempt to reproduce" then. Because a lot of those studies cannot be reproduced, that's the point.

suyula• 4 years ago

You've just passed your viva-- now all that's left to do is eat this marshmallow, or wait 10 minutes and get two marshmallows.

jimrandomh2• 4 years ago

Primary source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... .

jimrandomh2• 4 years ago

The whole thing reads like lawyers talking about bugs in a spreasheet, without being willing to show the spreadsheet itself. And everything in the spreadsheet itself is survey data, not the results of experiments, which puts it on shaky footing to begin with. My own perspective is that this entire branch of research--trying to figure out risk factors for nutrition based on non-intervential studies--is a failed paradigm which cannot reasonably be expected to produce true conclusions, has a long history of producing false conclusions that were later overturned. It's basically pseudoscience.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 4 years ago

Joke's on them. I never stopped eating red meat :)

andy_ppp2• 4 years ago

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 because it would cost too much and consequently the "science" that is done is meaningless.

Peter Attia makes some interesting suggestions on how to improve things (from David Allison's work) here [1].

[1] https://peterattiamd.com/nutritional-epidemiology-abolition-...

cryptonector2• 4 years ago

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

jokethrowaway2• 4 years ago

Carnivores are a fairly recent phenomenon. The studies linking meat to health issues were done on the McDonald's and coke population.

There is also zero commercial interest in pushing meat over carb filled diets.

Look inside any supermarket. It's literally 95% non-meat processed food with long expiry date, an easy manufacturing process and the added benefit of keeping people addicted and hungry.

jiggywiggy• 4 years ago

This is more than a replication error.

Large-scale studies, with results that have too many variables, have strong tendency to underwrite the consensus.

That wouldn't be such an issue, if they have huge impact on policy making.

In this case the zeitgeist is against meat, for obvious reasons, but there are many more of them.

yessirwhatever• 4 years ago

Shocker... That's what you get when you politicize climate.

benjaminmaccini• 4 years ago

@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").

robertlagrant• 4 years ago

Never mind red meat deaths. Studies on kidney stones have been found to often involve p-forcing.

RappingBoomer• 4 years ago

what do you mean by that?

mbrodersen• 4 years ago

The more I learn about nutritional science the less I trust it. The amount of corruption, incompetency, and political cherry picking routinely demonstrated by nutritional “scientists” is jaw dropping.

taylodl• 4 years ago

This is how science is supposed to work. There really doesn't appear to be anything to see here.

'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

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