Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research

https://bigthink.com/health/red-meat-cancer-not-health-risk/

by mmq • 4 years ago

510 421 4 years ago

"Unprocessed" seems to be the key word that the headline skips, plus the one specific risk category. So basically the headline is a lie.

But ignoring that, the article is further confirmation that you should eat more vegetables and less processed meat, like your doctors have been telling you. But with some extra attacks on expertise and science, which I'm sure will be helpful in further eroding our civilization.

onceiwasthere• 4 years ago

Is there any regulated/"official" definition to the word "processed" in this context? I see the word so much in the context of food in general and I've never known exactly what it means.

mark_l_watson3• 4 years ago

Buy foods in bulk, not boxed or in plastic. Make food from scratch from whole grains, veggies, peppers, spices. Avoid all of the seed oils.

My Dad is 101 and doing OK, and he has always preferred large salads, small amounts of lean meat. I feel better whenever I hit the Fuhrman Diet for six months.

weatherlight• 4 years ago

I always assumed it meant, cured, chemically preserved or fermented.

ZeroGravitas3• 4 years ago

Processed meat refers to meat that has been preserved by smoking, curing, salting or adding preservatives. This includes sausages, bacon, ham, salami and pâtés.
If you currently eat more than 90g (cooked weight) of red or processed meat a day, the Department of Health and Social Care advises that you cut down to 70g.

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/meat-nutrit...

adrian_b3• 4 years ago

Scanning the article, I do not see any definition, except that at one place "fresh" is also mentioned.

I assume that "unprocessed" meat refers to meat that is cooked at home, as opposed to buying sausages, ham or any other industrial meat products, which may contain various additives or impurities from techniques like smoking.

This new study still shows an increased probability of cancer when consuming more than 200 g of unprocessed red meat per day, which is indeed more than should normally be eaten.

I have always been skeptical about these claims about the effects of eating meat, because they do not differentiate between the different methods of cooking the meat. I doubt that eating meat that was fried in oil has the same health effects as eating meat that was baked in an oven.

ufo• 4 years ago

For a precise definition of "processed", check out the NOVA system. The biggest villains are the "ultra processed" foods.

https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrit...

denton-scratch10• 4 years ago

So the stock photo for "processed food" in MSM reports seems to be a picture of a hamburger. As far as I'm aware, the only processed things in a hamburger are the bun and the cheese. Oh - maybe the secret sauce; but I tell them to hold the cheese and sauce.

For me, processed meat means rubbery hotdog sausages; reconstituted chicken meat; doner kebab; TV dinners; fishcakes, and so on. [Edit: ham and bacon, of course, but only a crazy person eats a quarter-pound of bacon.] I imagine some of those are fine, but if you can't see the unprocessed ingredient, then the 'Lemon Market' rule says it's probably not what it's supposed to be.

mingus88• 4 years ago

I, for one, only read an article if something is being SLAMMED

ricardobayes3• 4 years ago

Sure, 'meat' itself is fine, it's the nitrosamine used to cure it, that's the bad part. Anyway, my old boss was a cancer researcher and he always said if you do these three things you have basically done everything to avoid getting cancer: - excercise a little every day - don't smoke - avoid red meat

ravenstine2• 4 years ago

"Unprocessed" seems to be the key word that the headline skips

The cancer claims haven't been specifically against things like hot dogs, sausages, pepperoni sticks, etc., but red meat. When the term "red meat" is used, that's implying anything containing red-looking meat from large ruminant animals.

plus the one specific risk category

That's because that's the only risk category that anyone thought was credible up to this point. There are no risk categories for red meat, besides perhaps that one can overeat protein. That's really hard to do, especially with red meat.

But ignoring that, the article is further confirmation that you should eat more vegetables and less processed meat,

There is no sound scientific evidence that anyone should eat more vegetables. People are certainly free to eat vegetables, they can be pretty tasty, and some may come with their own individual benefits, but there's nothing inherent to vegetables as a category that means we should simply consume more of them. Vegetables have their own drawbacks and contain various substances that are contraindicated in humans. Vegetables may be better than processed foods on a case by case basis, but not as a group. Humans aren't specialized in consuming them as a primary source of nutrition.

like your doctors have been telling you

"Your doctors" know f--- all about nutrition. General practitioners are not nutritionists and are not trained in nutrition. Their job is to prescribe pills or send you to a specialist.

denton-scratch10• 4 years ago

that's implying anything containing red-looking meat from large ruminant animals.

Pigs are not ruminants. Their meat is usually considered red meat.

Havoc• 4 years ago

I had understood it’s mostly the preservatives and processing - sausages etc

ystad• 4 years ago

Also, does adding fertilizer makes vegetables processed. Processed is vague.

denton-scratch10• 4 years ago

"Fertilizer" is vague.

solardev• 4 years ago

It's ok, next year another study will prove they're dangerous again.

ankaAr• 4 years ago

Amen

globalise83• 4 years ago

Well-cooked red meat, no, but what about undercooked or raw beef from cancerous cattle?

_aavaa_• 4 years ago

What about poisonous mushrooms, or rotten vegetables?

The pushback is against potentially finding negative impacts of one part of a category and labeling the whole category based off that one example.

type0• 4 years ago

raw beef from cancerous cattle?

Your stomach digests it. That is essentially what a lab grown meat is, a bunch of cancer cells.

DAVer984• 4 years ago

Wheels are coming off the Climate bullshit they keep peddling and this lab grown meat being cancer cells is a fantastic bit of news for me. No way that catches on in the mainstream.

skummetmaelk• 4 years ago

Cancer is not an infectious disease.

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

some cancers can be triggered by infectious pathogens though (HPV, some leukemias / lymphomas)

gpderetta2• 4 years ago

Tell that to Tasmanian devils!

boh• 4 years ago

Thing that you thought was bad is good and thing that you thought was good is bad, that's 80% of nutritional click-bait. One note summaries of studies aren't worth reading and shouldn't shape your choices. Whatever rough understanding most people have of healthy vs unhealthy is close enough. We don't need to pretend we're all nutritional scientists attempting olympic athlete level nutritional perfection.

COGlory4• 4 years ago

This is because nearly 100% of nutritional education effort is directed at children, which is stupid because children eat what their parents cook. Anyways, that has left a gaping hole for lifestyle blogs to fill with their pseudo-science.

When I was getting my Nutrition degree, I was involved in building a community website to help single fathers learn to cook for their kids. When we applied for the funding, we were one of three applications in the adult education section, versus hundreds in the child education category.

dizzant• 4 years ago

This is a fascinating observation about the funding of nutrition education, thank you for sharing it.

What do you think are the reasons most education efforts are spent on children? It seems to mirror the fact that children spend a significant part of their time on education, while adult education is ad-hoc and self-directed. Are there other factors that you can see from inside the field?

tluyben2• 4 years ago

So, please provide a definition of ‘processed’. Like everyone says here, it is really not clear what that is.

It seems ‘an intuition’ to what processed is to most people; some things are obvious ($1 per 12 freezer pack of burgers are not going to be unprocessed), but it gets less obvious fast…

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

ground mystery meat full of preservatives, coloring, soy protein to mask its own low protein content, and plenty of other shit. fast food slop for bipedal cattle

stfp• 4 years ago

I don't think we need a strict definition. If people really got the message "processed food is bad" and made reasonable choices from that information and their intuition (or a google image search) they would stop eating the worst things, which would help a lot.

chasd002• 4 years ago

yeah, also, it would probably help to think in terms like "raw foods are better" instead of "processed food is bad". When shopping, just try to get as close to raw as you can instead of trying to determine the dividing line between good and bad.

ihatepython• 4 years ago

My own definition: If the ingredient list contains something that you are not exactly sure what it is, then it is processed.

Personally I consider a can of skipjack tuna in spring water to be unprocessed, even though it has been canned.

I consider a frozen bag of peeled and cooked shrimp to be unprocessed, even though it has been peeled, cooked, and frozen.

But a frozen bag of peeled garlic shrimp I would consider to be processed, because the ingredient list contains items I don't exactly know what they are.

So that's my definition, it's the ingredient list.

jamesredd2• 4 years ago

Of course red meat is healthy. So is dairy. The demonization of saturated fat has had disastrous health consequences.

bboylen3• 4 years ago

From my basic research into saturated fats, they are only really a problem if you are high in cholesterol and need to lower it.

I've checked my cholesterol levels and they are low, despite me being a fan of butter and red meat. If they ever became a problem I would cut out the saturated fats, but there seems to be little point in doing that preemptively.

jamesredd2• 4 years ago

The cholesterol discussion is highly nuanced. There are alternative theories of the function of lipoproteins in the blood. If you're interested check out Dave Feldman's work around his theory, the Lipid Energy Model. https://cholesterolcode.com/model/

monopoliessuck3• 4 years ago

As a vegetarian for well over a decade, I've always said the same thing. Meat isn't nearly as egregiously unhealthy as it's panned if at all. Processed foods, excessive simple carbohydrates and sugars are the main evils in the kitchen, but there are a variety of reasons to eat less meat too.

There's nuance in all of this. People sympathetic to American consumption patterns will probably see science and explanations like this as some kind of endorsement of their diet. Nutritional science is still in its infancy and we'll be waffling on the specifics for decades to come, especially if food companies have a vested interest in funding studies.

Another data point. Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake. I think people are too hyper focused on the "super" and "evil" quality of foods and we end up stuck in the margins bike-shedding the minutia.

mark_l_watson3• 4 years ago

I agree with you “Processed foods, excessive simple carbohydrates and sugars are the main evils in the kitchen, but there are a variety of reasons to eat less meat too.”

I like to eat red meat two or three times a month: tasty and I think some red meat is healthy for me.

I avoid any packaged food except I am too lazy to always make homemade bread. +1 for shopping for fresh vegetables, fruits, berries, whole grains, beans,…

Really, the main center parts of grocery stores where everything is in plastic or boxes really needs to be avoided.

As a substitute for packaged deserts, making a pancake and berries is pretty good.

autotune3• 4 years ago

My breakfast these days is usually a few pieces of bacon and oatmeal. I am happy and still managing to burn off weight with that combo.

SantalBlush• 4 years ago

Personally speaking, the main setback of fresh fruits and vegetables isn't the taste or the inconvenience of cooking with them, it's the spoilage. They go bad so quickly that it's a chore to keep them around and make sure they get used in time.

sgc2• 4 years ago

The main reason people eat so unhealthily in the US is the price gouging in the vegetable aisle.

My wife came home with a small bag of brussel sprouts and some "gourmet" Baklava that weighed a bit less, but not much. Virtually the same price.

It is very common for (cardboard tasting) tomatoes, which come from a high-production plant, to cost as much or even more than meat, that comes from a plant-consuming animal and then butchered and constantly refrigerated. the vegetable/meat price ratio in the US means vegetables are comparatively 3-5x+ more expensive than any of the many other places I have lived. They are more like 10x less expensive than meat in in some places I have lived. The same goes for nuts to carbs, etc. And you will feel it immediately in lack of energy and hunger if you don't have protein and the sufficient number of daily calories, while lack of vegetables mainly leads to a more subtle lack of general health.

personjerry• 4 years ago

Really, the main center parts of grocery stores where everything is in plastic or boxes really needs to be avoided.

But that's where things are cheap and convenient! :(

OJFord2• 4 years ago

I avoid any packaged food except I am too lazy to always make homemade bread.

Ha, so do I, except if you started forcing me to give in to certain things bread would be one of the last I'd be willing to give up. (Unless I was allowed 'packaged' bread from an actual baker I suppose.)

Pre-sliced supermarket bread has to be me the most miserable yet widespread thing in existence, can't stand the stuff any more.

adrian_b3• 4 years ago

Until this year I believed that if I would attempt to make bread at home every day I would waste too much time, because I was making bread in a traditional way.

However, after some experimentation, I have discovered that it is possible to make bread in a simplified way, which does not need more than 10 minutes of effective work for one bread made of 500 g of wheat floor (including washing the vessels etc.).

I bake the bread in a microwave oven, in a lid-covered glass vessel. The right baking time must be determined by experiments, in my oven it is 13 minutes @ 1000 W for the dough made of 500 g of floor.

The advantage of the microwave oven is a short baking time and perfect reproducibility. After kneading the dough in a glass bowl for a few minutes, I can put it in the oven and go to do other activities. Now I make at home one bread every day after I wake up, for breakfast.

When baked at microwaves, you can use a leavening agent for a more conventional bread, but even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste.

Previously I was tempted from time to time to buy some commercial bread or cakes, but now I no longer care about them, I like more my own bread.

ravenstine2• 4 years ago

[...] there are a variety of reasons to eat less meat too.

Could you provide some examples?

halpmeh• 4 years ago

It’s energy intensive

consp• 4 years ago

I would argue carbon footprint (which is huge) or methane emissions.

Twirrim• 4 years ago

Environmental impact of meat production is one major one, but it depends on what meat we're talking about. Beef and similar are absolutely terrible from an environmental perspective. It takes significantly more water and space to produce comparable quantities of beef to other meat sources, or plants. Chicken and Turkey are usually better on that score.

angry_moose2• 4 years ago

As someone going on 5 years vegetarian:

Environmental impact (both carbon and water), animal cruelty/welfare in factory farms, high cost of more sustainable/lower cruelty options, general distaste for most of it

neuronic• 4 years ago

Environmental impact has been mentioned a few times but personally (!) I have reduced (not yet eliminated) my meat consumption mostly due to the fact that my short term unnecessary enjoyment is not justified in the face of the insane cruelty connected to mass animal farming. There is plenty of well-established documentation about this industry you can find online and subjectively I find it psychopathic.

I personally cannot consume meat from mass production anymore with a good conscience after hearing pigs scream in pain as their cage entered into the CO2 cloud used to kill them. The CO2 forms acid when coming into contact with their eyes, nose, lungs and mouths. You can kinda get a tiny hint of that feeling when you drink too much carbonated soda and burp up CO2 throw your nose by accident.

I hope it doesn't sound patronizing but that's MY reason to avoid meat, even more so than the terrible environmental impact. If you have ever spent time with pigs on a farm, they are eerily similar to dogs in some ways, so intelligent and funny. We would never subject dogs to the crazy amount of torture and violence just to eat them for 5 minutes out of no necessity at all and I believe it takes cognitive dissonance and plain ignorance to then just torture pigs for years and then kill them. Most of them never get to see the sun or run across a field of grass in the spring. Just death, disease, oozing wounds and death by acid-suffocation.

lm284693• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4

This one did it for me.

I have no problem with eating meat in principle, but it's hard/expensive to find ethically raised/killed meat

fsflover• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643838

monopoliessuck3• 4 years ago

It really depends on what you want to maximize in your life, health and environment. Not everyone will agree, but here are some things to chew on.

* Animal products require an inordinate amount of water to produce compared to plant-based products.

* Animal breeding and grazing at scale creates a bunch of environmental issues.

  - Methane production

  - Dust bowl effect due to over-grazing

  - Manure runoff and associated effects

  - Crazy abuse and proliferation of antibiotics and the resulting antibiotic resistant bacteria

* Ocean dredging for seafood is horribly destructive to marine environments.

* Fish, due to other human-origin environmental issues, are loaded with methyl-mercury and arsenic. This trend is only getting worse.

* Animals have brains and the associated emotion, pain and fear responses to trauma.

* Outside of chickens, most animals we like to eat are higher order mammals that are arguably more susceptible to the kinds of pain and distress we feel ourselves.

* Animal rights standards for slaughterhouses, especially in the US, are abysmal.

* Food and food handling standards for meat, especially in the US, are abysmal.

* Meat production creates a lot of secondary waste products that wouldn't be market competitive if they weren't subsidized by super-high meat production. Used as fillers in all kinds of things from pet food to cosmetics.

  - eg. Animal tallow, gelatin, organ meat, animal bone-meal

  - some of these are inherently useful, but as meat consumption rises to meet demand, so do these byproducts' supply and they show up all over as they now compete with vegetable based options.

* Risks of parasites, improper cooking, spoilage, etc.

* Nutritional benefits exist, but there are nutritional issues with red meat, organ meat and associated fats as well.

* A lot of food "certifications" are industry-managed and opaque to consumers, pushing a lot of negative externalities under the rug and making these things worse, not better.

  - "Grass-fed" is a "best-effort" thing and most companies that claim this are still only seasonally feeding their animals grass while also supplementing with diets molasses.

  - Free-range, prairie raised, farm-fresh, cage-free... What this means depends largely on who you ask.

  - etc. etc.

There are more bullets I'm sure too, I'll stop listing though. Hope this helps.

Just given the above, animal foods aren't required for adequate human sustenance and yet there are a lot of issues with them.

There are of course nutritional benefits to consuming meat and negative externalities from modern agricultural practices, but I think animal production has high costs for its benefits.

It doesn't have to be an all or nothing either. Everyone reducing their meat consumption by a little has an outsized impact compared to some zealots doing so. No one benefits if we treat this as some kind of morality food fight or religious crusade.

latchkey• 4 years ago

Not all countries have standards for handling meat. Have you ever been to a developing nation? I spent 4 years living and traveling all over Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos by motorbike.

"Street food" sounds awesome until you realize that you have no idea where the meat you're eating came from, how it was raised, handled, prepared. It is cheap for a reason. It could have easily been the stuff you saw by the side of the road sitting out in the sun with flies all over it. Ever been to a wet market?

I was once in a super remote town in northern Vietnam staying at a small hotel. They were having a festival of some sort and someone had left a 300+ lbs pig in the parking lot sitting there in the sun. Alive, barely. It was so abused, it could barely lift its head. That was going to be the delight of the festival.

How do you even know the meat is the meat they say it is? I've seen my share of dog/cat restaurants. Other than those being generally more expensive... who knows... maybe they ran out of pig that day (swine flu was in full effect when I was there).

Certainly, veggies also have their share of issues... sprayed with who knows what sorts of chemicals smuggled in from China... grown next to polluted rivers... in polluted air.

Now, back in the US, we have it so good here...

tapanjk• 4 years ago

Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible ...

Fully agree with your take except for "eat [...] as often as possible" part. For instance, intermittent fasting is effective exactly because of not eating often.

jjulius• 4 years ago

I don't think "often" means "as much as you can during the day", I think it means to try to have that kind of food at each meal/snack as often as you can.

jasonjmcghee• 4 years ago

parent comment very likely meant "[when choosing a meal] eat [...] as often as possible", not recommending eating constantly throughout the day

Mtinie• 4 years ago

I understood the comment to mean, “when given the choice between minimally processed whole foods and highly processed packaged foods, pick the former as often as possible,” not “eat frequently.”

legulere• 4 years ago

I start to wonder if you can eat with too much variety as well. People tend to eat more when there's more variety (low-carb and potato-only diets work mostly by making you bored of eating).

kritiko• 4 years ago

The slime mold guys are currently testing the hypothesis that the potassium in potatoes is why the potato monodiet works…

The mechanism of diets isn’t understood yet - check out Kevin Hall’s metabolic ward study of low fat high carb vs. high fat low carb for some paradoxical results.

I’d be happy finding a diet that consistently works for people before understanding how.

SapporoChris2• 4 years ago

There has to be somewhere in the spectrum a company that processes food and it ends up being superior. In fact, I bet it's more prevalent than you expect.

I did a few searches. Turns out there are benefits to food processing. Inactivation of toxins seems like a big plus to me. Improved nutrition, seems good.

Yes, many processed foods are of nutritionally poor value, but please don't label all processed food as being bad.

eduction• 4 years ago

This is a great point. "Processed food" is an incredibly broad category that is being somewhat demonized at the moment (not saying any comments here do this).

According to this Mayo Clinic quotation of USDA, processed food includes anything dried, frozen, canned, or mixed. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...

I don't think (and am guessing most would agree) canned tomatoes are particularly harmful food, nor are frozen blueberries or fish, nor are dried raisins when I'm putting them in oats.

It's a spectrum. With my kids, dried mangoes make me slightly guilty because I know they are pretty high in sugar, albeit natural sugar. Most people would be more wary of frozen chicken nuggets. Some more specificity around what makes processed foods harmful, from the science and science comms communities, would be helpful.

docandrew6• 4 years ago

Depends on the food - something like acorns, for example, they are inedible for humans in their whole form, but hulling, grinding the nuts, and rinsing them of tannins makes a tasty nutritious flour.

The word “processed” is kind of a lazy heuristic - butchering, cooking, hulling, mixing, those are all ways of processing that are healthy and effective.

Creating something like a Twinkie is a whole different ballgame and looks more like a triumph of chemical engineering and material science than anything related to baking or cooking.

tharkun__3• 4 years ago

I'd say many of these terms are way too vaguely defined and used. What exactly counts as "packaged" food? What's "processed" food?

If I process cabbage into Sauerkraut or Kimchi, does that count as bad, because it's "processed"? What if it's processed by some company? What if they process it differently?

Case in point, Sauerkraut. If I make that at home, the bacteria stay alive the whole time. They still multiply in my fridge right now and keep the Sauerkraut OK to eat if a bit mushy after being left in there for too long coz I don't eat it often enough. If I buy Sauerkraut in a glass it's dead. Sure, they also used bacteria to actually make the Sauerkraut. And then they killed off all of the good bacteria by pasteurization to be able to stick it on a shelf w/ a long best before date and to guarantee the texture and color. Not to mention the extra "ingredients" they put in there.

l5870uoo9y• 4 years ago

I think the term is imprecise and there should be a distinction between:

- cheese, pickled herring, charcuterie and such which can be part of a healthy diet

- pre-made (supermarket) meals or junk food (a vulgar term but unfortunately fitting) which typically aren't part of a healthy diet

tremon• 4 years ago

a company that processes food and it ends up being superior

To be glib, any process that makes normally undigestible things edible to humans would qualify for that. Cooked rice is superior to raw rice, fermented cabbage is superior to raw cabbage, and glazed onions are superior to raw onions.

That's usually not the type of processing people refer to when they use the term "processed foods". It usually refers to a type of processing where the original ingredients are no longer individually recognizable, and where the end result contains much more additives (sugar, salt, fats) than were in the original product(s).

Spooky235• 4 years ago

“Processed” is a bullshit word”.

When you see “natural”, “processed” or “toxin” in reference to a food, health or cosmetic product, pretend the word isn’t there. At best, it means nothing, at worst it is a manipulation designed to part your money from you or a fake cure.

SpicyLemonZest• 4 years ago

Popular wisdom is hopelessly confused on what "processed" means. Cheese, yogurt, tofu, nixtamal are all subjected to intensive processes using industrial chemicals which radically alter their flavor and texture. But it feels almost trolly to suggest that they're processed foods in the same way that a Twinkie is. Certainly it seems ridiculous to suggest they're less processed than frozen french fries - but they are! Many brands of fries are just potato, oil, salt, coloring, with the only processing steps being cutting, frying, freezing.

I think most people understand it to mean something more like "stuffed full of oil or sugar".

KineticLensman• 4 years ago

My rule of thumb is to think about the processes and whether I could do them in my kitchen or not. Things like 'boil' or 'grate' are recognizable processes that I don't worry about. Thinks like 'hydrogenated' are indicators that some serious modification of the underlying ingredients has taken place.

The term 'hyper-processed' is used to refer to foods that bare very little resemblance to recognizable ingredients straight from the farm.

greyhair2• 4 years ago

Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake.

If you highly diversify your diet, if any one thing is 'bad' for you, you are by your actions, reducing your exposure to it.

As far as processed foods, there are different forms of 'processing'. For example, canned vegetables are pretty minimally processed. Cured sausages are more highly processed, and nacho cheese doritos are really highly processed.

bergenty• 4 years ago

It doesn’t get less processed than a fresh red meat steak.

rubicon33• 4 years ago

I’ve found a simple rule of thumb that works for me:

Nature has a way of limiting how much of a certain substance you can consume. By simply eating less processed foods, you’re eating more in line with what the human body expects historically.

Take oils for example. It requires immense pressure and processing, only available in the Industrial Age, to produce the quantitates of certain oils. We consume way more oil than ever expected. Sugar is in the same boat. Ground wheat is kinda too…

The more processing the worse it is for you, as a general rule of thumb. So yea, eat Whole Foods when you can!

beebmam• 4 years ago

Nature has a way of limiting how much of a certain substance you can consume.

Is your belief that "Nature" is an actor which can (intentionally or unintentionally) limit human consumption? Or are you saying something more like: "there's a physical limit to how much air a human can breathe in a day"?

aardvarkr• 4 years ago

Oil wasn’t as hard to come by as you’d expect. Think of butter, animal fat, olive oil, seed oils, etc. It’s nowhere near as hard to make as you seem to think. The first recorded history of deep frying is from 2500 BCE.

Wheat too was in our diets long ago with the first recorded use in 32,000 BCE. Sugar was 8,000 BCE.

fowkswe• 4 years ago

Michael Pollan said it best: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

heather45879• 4 years ago

Unfortunately food is religion to many folks. They will die defending their precious food choices.

The problem with articles like this is that it’s designed to be an echo chamber of denialism.

The key to being healthy is good diet. Good diet means good ingredients. Most animals are treated like crap and fed crap too—save for a few small-scale producers.

If you want to eat meat do yourself (and everyone having to hear these discussions) a favor: visit a high quality Kobe cattle ranch and see how they treat the animals.

Then visit a large-scale farm (tip: you might need top-secret clearance) which provides the majority of beef products to the USA.

Compare the difference…

Garbage in = garbage out.

km3r• 4 years ago

Is there any research to back up that treating cattle better improves the nutrition of beef?

orangepurple• 4 years ago

Besides the obvious problem of WHAT should I eat there is the problem of HOW MUCH should I eat. And in general we eat too much volume wise AND at inappropriate times relative to our circadian rhythm. CLOCK genes exist! And eating changes your genetic expression.

lolinder2• 4 years ago

You're obviously right that processed foods are far worse, but the study the article cites[0] doesn't say what the article says it does, not at all. The article deliberately misconstrues the phrase "weak evidence" to mean that the authors are attacking the past studies, when in fact they're just saying more research needs to be done. Here's the opening paragraph of the Discussion section:

We evaluated the relationship between unprocessed red meat consumption and six selected disease outcomes following implementation of a meta-analytic approach. We found that unprocessed red meat intake had weak evidence of an association with increased risk of colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes and no evidence of an association with ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke. In other words, given all the data available on red meat intake and risk of a subsequent outcome, we estimate that consuming unprocessed red meat across an average range of exposure levels increases the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes at least slightly compared to eating no red meat (by at least 6%, 3%, 1% and 1%, respectively).

[0] Full text here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z#Sec2

notSupplied• 4 years ago

Sadly, news articles always grossly exaggerate research results.

"We found weak evidence of ..." becomes "New study ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS the myth that..."

cogman105• 4 years ago

You're obviously right that processed foods are far worse

I see this claim semi frequently online. So I'll just ask.

What is meant by "processed"? What does it mean to be "worse" (Worse than meat? Regular foods?) What is meant by "whole foods"? And finally, what's the evidence for these assertions?

Is black tea a processed food? How about coffee grounds? When does something cross the rubric of processed vs unprocessed?

To me, it's not obvious that "processed is bad" particularly because I don't know what "processed" means.

As a side, how do fortified foods fit in with processed foods? Iodine in salt, for example, has been a huge public health success. Goiters have practically been eliminated as a result.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

Weak evidence of a risk increase from 4.3% to 4.6% of colorectal cancer? Okay, if that's where we end on red meat's cancer risk, I think I'll take it.

pessimizer5• 4 years ago

by at least 6%, 3%, 1% and 1%

But this is very, very weak evidence.

edit: of course I have to assume something about the structure of the data to say it's very weak evidence. It may be very strong evidence of a very weak effect.

-----

edit 2: Also, how is this, the last "takeaway," listed in bold, large font directly beneath the headline, some sort of exaggeration or mischaracterization?

They only found weak evidence that unprocessed red meat consumption is linked to colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease, and no link at all between eating red meat and stroke.

noptd• 4 years ago

just saying more research needs to be done

Right, because the results of the previous studies amount to evidence that is too weak to conclude that red meat is inherently unhealthy to consume. I'm not sure how your comment contradicts this.

diob• 4 years ago

I'm not a vegetarian either, but like you I prefer straight forward foods.

Breakfast for me is eggs, avo, toast, some light veggies (spinach, other leafy stuff). Tasty, probably alright for me.

I'm not good at the diversify part though . . . I tend to eat this every day :)

monopoliessuck3• 4 years ago

I'm unsure by your wording, but I am a vegetarian in case that's what you mean by "either" - over a decade and still ongoing. Not very important, but I just wanted to clarify.

Your breakfast sounds tasty. I don't blame you for having it often. :+1:

hawski• 4 years ago

I lately wonder about Japanese or Italian cuisine. Those nations are around the top for longevity of life - at least some specific parts of the population. If the diet has a significant part in this I have a silly theory: they make their food relatively simple and quick, but very tasty. I would even say that Japanese cuisine is for making vegetables delicious for example.

I do recognize I probably don't know nearly enough.

mr_johnson222• 4 years ago

Maybe the secret is fish-based diets.

cactus20933• 4 years ago

"Processed Foods" is another vague, exaggerated boogeyman though.

For one thing I don't think most people would even agree on what foods count as processed and are bad. Some people are talking about everything except fresh vegetables, some people are talking about specifically industrially-processed food but would say the exact same recipe followed at home (minus a couple of preservatives) is perfectly fine, some people are specifically against fast food but might think canned foods are fine.

Large blood sugar spikes after a meal are what is bad for you, but this a more nuanced equation of things like glycemic load of the food (which is as much a factor of quantity eaten as it is glycemic index), genetics, and level of exercise. It's not as simple as just saying all processed food is always bad, for instance after a hard workout simple carbohydrates are not just ok but actively good for you, and ideally most people should be doing a hard workout multiple times per week. Some other components of processed food like excessive salt can be bad, as is the fact that they often push out more micronutrient-rich foods from your diet.

But it kind of strikes me as the abstinence-only approach to dietary advice. People love the taste of processed foods, I think we'd do better to encourage eating responsibly overall than insisting on avoiding processed foods altogether. And it's possible to be very healthy while eating a significant amount of processed foods.

anm893• 4 years ago

I disagree on this point all though I think the term is vague.

If I grill a steak and then chop it up into pieces i have "processed" it. This isn't what anyone is talking about when they say processed foods though.

If I chop up several different types of meat, add several different colorants, fillers, perservatives and whatever else, turn it all into a slurry and then reconsistute it into a spam loaf, I think there are a lot of good reasons to believe this is ineherently unhealthy, the most simple being that its really easy to dump in a bunch of sugar and extra fats.

shadowfox• 4 years ago

I think we'd do better to encourage eating responsibly overall than insisting on avoiding processed foods altogether. And it's possible to be very healthy while eating a significant amount of processed foods

Interesting. I am curious what your definition of "responsible eating" is?

mritchie7122• 4 years ago

diversify

The conventional wisdom says you should have variety in your diet, but it's unclear to me why that's "good" and I've never seen research on it.

taurusnoises• 4 years ago

And yet, from the position of my armchair and the handful of books on my shelf, history has shown that a monodiet (relative to the modern, diversified western diet, at least) is not only sustainable, but has been the backbone of the human diet for thousands of years.

raarts• 4 years ago

I think common wisdom says this is the best way to get all the vitamins and minerals your body needs.

angarg12• 4 years ago

After living in England for a while, this year we finally moved to the US. Although I have never been too athletic, I've put on 5-7 KG since we moved, and I can't shed them off. We are mostly eating the same as before, and in fact I'm more active than I was over there.

There isn't much point to this comment other than the flabbergasting anecdote of how eating roughly the same diet in different countries can have markedly different effect in your health.

jstarfish• 4 years ago

Diet can have different effect across different states in the US too. California doesn't (seem to) use the same types of lard and oils that you'd find in Georgia, judging by cholesterol issues that self-resolved without change in diet or exercise.

HDThoreaun• 4 years ago

I find that portions are generally bigger in the US. Especially if you're not in California easy to eat the same stuff but just have a bigger plate.

CadmiumYellow8• 4 years ago

Look carefully at the ingredients list on any packaged foods you're buying. Many things contain sugar in the US when the equivalent product in Europe does not. A particularly insidious example is pre-made broth/stock: nearly every single product on the shelves at my local grocery store contains unnecessary sugar. Same goes for canned beans and salad dressings. Doing your due diligence when buying packaged foods is an unfortunate necessity if you live in the US and want to stay healthy. God, I miss grocery shopping in France!!

kennend3• 4 years ago

As the other guy said watch your SUGAR intake.

Because of corn subsidies the nation is awash in cheap corn. This is turned into "HFCS" and put everywhere.

Google "surprising sources of hidden sugar" - you might be surprised to find foods that you are not expecting sugar are buried with it in the US.

nkrisc• 4 years ago

Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake.

I think this is really the most important thing anyone can do. Not directed at you at all or at anything you said, but I dislike the term "vegetarian" in general. It suggests a binary diet: either you eat meat, or you don't. Someone who never eats meat and someone who eats meat once a month have essentially the same diet. It makes little sense to distinguish one as vegetarian and one as not. The pervasive idea that you could eat no meat for years and that somehow taking a bit of meat makes you "not vegetarian" anymore is kind of ridiculous. I won't get into it but the concept of "sobriety" often falls into the same trap.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with choosing to not eat any meat products (or not drink any alcohol), it's got nothing to do with the choices people make for themselves, simply how we discuss it.

I think the terms "vegetarian" and "vegan" are only useful as descriptors of food: whether it contains meat or any animal products at all. But categorizing people as "vegetarian" or "vegan" is absurd and counter-productive.

sweetheart2• 4 years ago

Veganism is a moral philosophy, so it really _only_ makes sense to use that term when referring to people. "Vegan" food is short-hand for "plant-based" food. Food does not subscribe to moral ideals, only people do. It's unfortunate that the difference between those terms has been so muddied with time, but it's an important distinction.

bacan• 4 years ago

What is "processed foods"? Isn't bread a heavily processed food? Is somehow making it at home magically healthier than it being made in a factory? What about whole wheat bread from a factory vs white bread at home? Which one is healthier?

Or are you trying to say that bread is somehow unhealthy? Even though it is staple eaten by literally everyone across the world in someway, shape or form.

Terms like this destroy the credibility of "food research" and I find it hard to trust any dietary guidance. Specially after the whole fat & sugar debacle

trebor• 4 years ago

Compare a hand-made loaf of bread to one from the grocery store. Count the number of ingredients. The hand-made loaf is usually made from flour, with water, oil, and leavening. If you buy unprocessed flour that makes 4 or 5 ingredients as a base. A store bought, whole wheat loaf of bread contains roughly 16 ingredients. The home-made loaf doesn't contain preservatives because it won't need to sit on a shelf for a prolonged period. The home-made loaf can use higher quality/purity ingredients than you will find in the grocery store in the USA. White bread is worse.

Not all bread is made the same. Not all bread ingredients are the same. Those individual ingredients can be processed as well. The more processing on the ingredients and end product, the more "processed" a food is. I'm not even touching "highly processed" or "ultra-processed" foods in this short post.

joenot443• 4 years ago

And so, the researchers came up with the burden of proof risk function, a novel statistical method to quantitatively “evaluate and summarize evidence of risk across different risk-outcome pairs.”

My stats knowledge is admittedly shallow, but this seemed a bit out of place to me. Is it common to develop novel statistical vehicles for meta-studies like this? My expectation would be that this is a kind of investigation we've been doing for a while, so new models aren't really needed.

denton-scratch10• 4 years ago

Yeah, that looked sus to me too.

Buttons8408• 4 years ago

From the first paragraph:

red meat consumption is linked to colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease

I'm only a little deceptive here, because the study only found "weak" evidence of the above, so they did find some evidence.

So the study produced some evidence that aligns with previous research and somehow this "slams" previous research?

triceratops• 4 years ago

"The dose makes the poison."

tony_cannistra7• 4 years ago

Gosh, for all the bluster in this comment section of supposed technical folks nobody seems to be highlighting what appears to be a very compelling methodological advance in the Burden of Proof methodology [0] used to produce this result.

"Here, we propose a complementary approach, in which we quantify the mean relationship (the risk function) between risk exposure and a disease or injury outcome, after adjusting for known biases in the existing studies. Unlike existing approaches, our approach does not force log-linearity in risk functions or make additional approximations, such as midpoint approximations for ranges or shared reference group"

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01973-2

DennisP• 4 years ago

Since they don't mention kidneys, I'd like to see someone apply their approach to this study, claiming that red meat increases the risk of end-stage renal disease:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5198288/

tony_cannistra7• 4 years ago

That's a good idea. As I understand it the Burden of Proof method is a meta-analytical method, though, which means it gets applied to a corpus of studies. I'm sure there are more than 1 study that tries to figure out that relationship, though.

boxed2• 4 years ago

Am I getting this right?

1. MANY studies over many years show red meat consumption is bad 2. This study shows that it's bad, but not a lot 3. This is ONE study we're talking about 4. This study invents a new statistical methodology

tony_cannistra7• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, you don't have it quite right.

This "one study" is a meta-analysis, which considers many studies.

Furthermore, meta-analysis methodology is very important. Doing it wrong is bad. Working to make it better is good.

They did that.

Aardwolf2• 4 years ago

The state of food research science is so ridiculously bad. We got paper after paper, and badly written news article after badly written news article, contradicting each other on everything about fat types, coffee, milk, meat, wine, anything else that's edible or drinkable you name it.

It's as if we know exactly zero information about the relationship between food and health, because for every fact, there'll be another contradictory fact.

I have no trust in food related scientific research. Give us properly conducted experiments with large enough (millions?) sample sizes and all the necessary blinds, publish it, and ensure we can STICK with it, don't leave openings for papers with the opposite opinion to be published, by making your experiment good enough to be indisputable. Thank you.

aetherane• 4 years ago

One contributing factor is that many studies are funded by the people selling you the food being studied

blowski• 4 years ago

Not just the foods, but also the books, pills, programmes, etc.

tony_cannistra7• 4 years ago

Give us properly conducted experiments with large enough (millions?) sample sizes, publish it, and ensure we can STICK with it, don't leave openings for papers with the opposite opinion to be published, by making your experiment good enough to be indisputable.

With all due respect, this comment sounds like you've not really ever considered how this research is actually conducted.

Aardwolf2• 4 years ago

I indeed don't know how research is conducted in this field, and I'm sorry if I made the wrong point due to that. But we're getting papers with opposite opinions now, so something is very wrong with how it's conducted now. Either do it properly, or be honest about the correctness/p-values/... to avoid articles on "red meat is bad", then articles with "red meat is not bad", or "coffee causes cancer", then "coffee has antioxidants and is good against cancer", etc...

angry_moose2• 4 years ago

One of my Grandpa's go-to joke from the 90s:

"Before <Grandma> starts making breakfast, can someone check the news and see if we're allowed to eat eggs this week?"

gz5• 4 years ago

As a layman, it feels like studies which are not specific to individual genomes (and expressions of those genomes), and don't usually consider differences in areas we seem to be learning more about every hour (e.g. gut biome), are going to be antiquated as we continue to learn more in those types of areas.

Said the other way, getting to the individual level will have a massive impact on how we approach health and medicine.

Am I too optimistic? If and when we can get to this individual level, are we each still a very complex system with too many unknown unknowns - too many interdependencies and unknown relationships between cause and effect (even when they do exist)?

thrwy_918• 4 years ago

The partisan tone of this article is very grating and makes it hard to take it seriously. It is full of brash, opinionated statements which are not backed up by the actual study [1] the article is based on.

I have to conclude that it's being upvoted here because people enjoy eating red meat and want to continue to do so, not because it has any particular merit on its own terms.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z

tony_cannistra7• 4 years ago

It is interesting how certain posts on HN elicit a compelling discussion and others more of a "everyone yelling into the void" situation.

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

Virtue signaling. A loaded term, yes. But it is exactly why these discussions go off the rails. Nutritional 'science' doesn't even really exist, so you can always find something out there that sounds very objective and intelligence which will back up the positions you already hold on faith.

This discussion today is already off to a great start with bro science and bragging about personal choices that are clearly the best, with the occasional 'but I am a little weak, so I don't get it perfect every time' tossed in to make it sound real. Hell, there's even a bit of the smug international 'this is just an America problem' already cropping up. Another day ending in Y on HN.

danuker• 4 years ago

At least we get a poll, in the form of the rank of comments.

ricardobayes3• 4 years ago

I have to agree, it's like one of those 'inspired' researches back in the day that promoted the health benefits of smoking.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

Also have to note that there's hundreds (thousands?) of studies that disagree, and you can p-hack anything, so every study should be taken with a grain of salt - especially when it contradicts a consensus.

chirau• 4 years ago

with a grain of salt... or now, with a piece of beef :)

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

FWIW upvotes don't correlate with accurate or impartial content, they correlate with engagement (controversial or entertaining content). Boring accurate science doesn't attract attention.

cbsmith2• 4 years ago

At least at this point, the link to the nature article is the #2 comment on this article...

dpkirchner• 4 years ago

And specifically engagement with the title, not so much the article. It'd be pretty hard for a link to make it out of new without some early knee-jerk pre-read upvotes, IMO.

hn2017• 4 years ago

There's been a lot of this partisan/one-sided articles on HN recently. Sometimes even just links to a random person's blog!

still_grokking• 4 years ago

I'm not sure, should I up-vote or down-vote?

Could you clarify whether this is sarcasm or not, so I can decide?

concinds2• 4 years ago

The tone is necessary. So much bullshit 'nutrition science', with defective methodologies, has been promoted by mainstream media (along with exaggerated nonsense on the "risks" of eggs, coffee, tea, spinach...) that it's appropriate for people to debunk these claims vigorously. These mainstream outlets shouldn't pretend the nocebo effect doesn't exist, and that their reporting won't harm people's health unnecessarily.

When better science comes around, then we can let the MSM get away with making these claims.

q1w2• 4 years ago

Two opposing lies do not form a truth.

martopix• 4 years ago

you're missing the point that not all of it was bullshit nutrition science. Research is an ongoing process.

lynndotpy• 4 years ago

I agree here. It's hard to read this as "Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of other studies. But you should totally trust this one, because the others are Lazy and Shoddy."

In an area where there are huge amounts of lobbyist dollars arguing in the same direction, I'd love more technical reasons about why every other study is flawed and why this burden-of-proof function is meaningful.

I'm not realistically going to read the 25 page PDF in a field I'm not in.

scoofy2• 4 years ago

Any study that "slams" decades of research needs to be reproduced or independently reanalyzed (for meta-analysis) before I take it seriously.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

tootie• 4 years ago

Yeah, and there's still a big gap between what data tells us and how to create policy. Sometimes waiting for conclusive evidence isn't possible and when you see warning signs you have to make recommendations. Especially considering the potential downside which in this case is really nothing. Eating meat may not be a terrible menace, but eating less meat is hardly a burden on anyone.

The health risks of eating unprocessed red meat may have been overstated, but there is still some evidence that has to be considered. And the article itself says that while the evidence of danger from meat consumption may be a proxy for correlated lifestyle changes so this narrow finding doesn't actually negate policy. Pushing people to eat whole grains, fruits and vegetables still stands as the best option.

slothtrop• 4 years ago

That tells you who the article is for. Snark does not change minds, but it satisfies certain readers.

DontchaKnowit• 4 years ago

Frankly, a LOT of nutritional science is heavily politicized, included the research the contra side of this article. The corn and grain industries have a long storied history of funding studies that support their targets and denigrate the meat industry as well as lobbying for regulations which benefit their industries.

marricks2• 4 years ago

Aren’t cattle the biggest grain consumers, so wouldn’t that be counter productive?

I’ve heard of the ag lobby and the meat and dairy lobbies but never big grain. Of course they exist and do something but going against the meat lobby just seems weird.

GenerocUsername• 4 years ago

Came to say this. So much health news is equally polarized just in the other direction.

When it skews towards your preconceived notions you hardly notice it. It's important to be aware of the voice behind the article

lr4444lr• 4 years ago

Science operates by biasing the null hypothesis. We may like red meat and be partial to it, but the onus is still on people to prove that it's harmful. Now even the correlation for that is falling apart.

umvi• 4 years ago

I have to conclude that it's being upvoted here because people enjoy eating red meat and want to continue to do so

Similarly, "wine/coffee/beer/marijuana/chocolate/etc is good for you" type studies tend to be upvoted because people like evidence that helps rationalize their habits and vices.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

No, that is different. Psychoactives we need to create this illusion of therapeutic use so that we can enjoy ourselves because otherwise the puritans will ban them. For instance, I'm under no illusion that alcohol, weed, LSD, shrooms, or MDMA are good for you in general but I have to promote articles like that because if I don't, puritans in this society will prevent me from enjoying them just like I enjoy jumping off bridges, skydiving, or motorcycling.

This is my life and the only way to live it is to lie to some people in a certain way. So we're going to have this mutually beneficial world where we have to modify the narrative so all parties can get what they want.

DueDilligence• 4 years ago

.. not buying it. not. one. bit.

COGlory4• 4 years ago

The Nutritional Science field is such an unmitigated disaster of bad science, unethical science, sponsored "science", and contradictory science. The rot starts at the top, with a gate-kept Academy of Nutritionists that is far more concerned about increasing Dietition wages and responsibility at hospitals (for instance, they want dietitians writing "food prescriptions" directly so they can bill insurance) than the quality and origin of the research they approve for their database.

It has been multiyear battles to get their "official scientific consensus) moved off things like "eggs are bad" and now finally "meat is bad". Glad to see there's progress being made. Also glad I got out of that field.

Buttons8408• 4 years ago

I don't know. Name an area of research that is more complicated and expensive to study than nutrition science. Fusion? That's less complicated.

COGlory4• 4 years ago

There are many, many, more complicated areas of research, including most other areas inside biology. We have millenia of trial-and-error as a starting point for nutrition. The fundamentals haven't changed, although the problems are new and inventive.

Anyways, I'm not complaining about it being hard or complicated, I'm complaining about it being low quality and corrupt. For instance: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

thereddaikon2• 4 years ago

Is this a joke? Nuclear physics is definitely more complicated. What super computers are the FDA commissioning to study nutrition?

simonsarris• 4 years ago

It is not about complexity of study but about epistemic humility. There is none.

If they acknowledged the complexity, there wouldn't have been a "Food Pyramid".

redanddead• 4 years ago

Got any more examples? fascinating stuff

gameshot911• 4 years ago

The rot starts at the top, with a gate-kept Academy of Nutritionists that is far more concerned about increasing Dietition wages

My wife is in the process of transferring her international nutrition degree to the US, and we learned that starting in Jan 2024, nutritionists will now need a Masters degree to be eligible for accreditation.

Talk about pulling up the drawbridge behind you...

COGlory4• 4 years ago

A Master's degree, plus a $30,000-$60,000 1-2 year competitive unpaid internship.

irusensei• 4 years ago

My Italian grand-grand parents lived a long life, often filled with hard work for the time they live in. I probably share a lot of their genetical structure. It seems logical to me that I should disregard "good and bad food" clickbait studies and eat and drink the same way they ate.

ricardobayes3• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone

rajin444• 4 years ago

Am I missing it, or is there no mention of genetics in there? That seems like such a massive oversight that failing to address it makes this meaningless.

It’s like comparing the space/time complexity of different programs without looking at the code - and instead only looking at the language it was written in.

lm284693• 4 years ago

and eat and drink the same way they ate

Can you still do that though ?

Animal farming evolved a looot since then

ragazzina• 4 years ago

Have you ever read an Italian cookbook from your grand-grandparents time? I doubt you are eating what they ate.

seydor• 4 years ago

slams !

maybe butchers

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

I don't want to speak like I'm some kind of expert on the state of nutrition research, but I at least follow expert summaries more closely than most people, meaning following science-minded folks in the evidence-based health and fitness communities, not popular science publishing.

My impression is that this is not really a problem with the research itself. There's the well-known problem of science journalists turning every finding into vastly simplified and often flat wrong clickbait. But there is a separate issue with recommendation bodies being very conservative and slow to change a recommendation. In all the time I've been paying attention, which is years now, every published finding about risks from red meat has pretty much exclusively been from processed and charred meats, with the risk clearly coming from nitrates and carbon, not from the meat itself.

I don't personally "like" this finding. I live in Texas, love brisket, got seriously into smoking meats for years in my 30s, but there is no way I can look at all the evidence that's come out and conclude anything other than that eating smoked meat on a regular basis for decades is going to increase risk. But at the same time, I have nothing to make me believe that simply eating red meat at all that has not been smoked or charred and otherwise modified in some way to extend shelf life, is going to increase risk. And the studies themselves never claimed this. It's health agencies and science journalism that chose to make this interpretation without it being justified, whether out of an abundance of caution or just to grab eyeballs.

xkbarkar• 4 years ago

Only a matter of time until the metrics of carbon foot print of the food industry are proven to be based on shoddy research too I suppose.

Leary• 4 years ago

I'll eat more red meat if anyone could link a study that shows more red meat consumption is linked to LESS cancer mortality. Thanks!

Buttons8408• 4 years ago

Not this study, it showed some ("weak") correlation between red meat consumption and poor health outcomes. Keep looking.

pessimizer5• 4 years ago

Nobody is trying to make you eat red meat, although its weird that you require it to cure cancer.

oifjsidjf2• 4 years ago

Grain fed meat is totaly different than grass fed meat.

Grain fed animals have very high saturated fat amount compared to grass fed ones.

Grass fed animals and wild boars and wild cattle have much more PUFAs than grain fed ones.

So the quality of meat went down drasticaly in the last 100 years.

Which is ironic since many carnivores are screaming "PUFA bad" in a reductionist fashion and at the same time say you "must eat only grass fed animals" lol.

keneda7• 4 years ago

Not familiar with PUFA (had to look it up). I am a little confused by what your last line is saying?

PUFA: Polyunsaturated fatty acids are fatty acids that contain more than one double bond in their backbone

oifjsidjf2• 4 years ago

The types of fats in grain fed and grass fed meat are different, that is what I was saying.

By "carnivores" I mean people who only eat meat: they are all taking the stance that "saturated fat good, PUFA bad".

dundarious3• 4 years ago

I think this is the most important figure in the actual study, and it absolutely doesn't justify the bold claims of bigthink. The upper right quadrant is the danger zone. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z/figures/4

The study tries to account for things like publication bias (though seems to not find any evidence for it or do any accounting for it in 5/6 of the comparisons under study). I don't think it's wise to conclude from the fringe cutting through the x-axis that only shoddy research would claim unprocessed red meat has a health risk (which is to say nothing about processed red meat, the subject of most of the headline-grabbing studies about health risks).

tony_cannistra7• 4 years ago

I don't think it's wise to conclude from the fringe cutting through the x-axis that only shoddy research would claim unprocessed red meat has a health risk

You're right, but they don't claim that. The y-axis here is "relative risk." There's no such thing as "no risk" in these studies.

Practically speaking, of course, there is -- most of us live our lives with "low risk" = "no risk," necessarily.

The takeaway from this figure is exactly what's written in the article: "As shown in Fig. 4, the relationship between unprocessed red meat intake and combined-cause incidence and mortality was increasing across the entire exposure domain."

dundarious3• 4 years ago

The takeaway from this figure is exactly what's written in the article: "As shown in Fig. 4 [...]"

That's from the study that I didn't criticize, not the bigthink article that I do criticize. The claims about "shoddy research" and "not a health risk" are from the bigthink article, not the study. If bigthink rewrote the article to focus on the quotation you provided, it would be far more informative.

Edit: And to somewhat address your point about relative risk (RR). If someone told me that an activity had almost no upside health risk, and a wide range of downside health risk, I would not think "no health risk" is an appropriate summary statement. Again, this is a criticism of the bigthink (or really, RealClearScience) article.

sergiotapia2• 4 years ago

Been on carnivore for 10 days now. Feel like a horse and my lifting energy has increased, my calisthenics have improved. I sleep better and don't feel bloated.

Grains and sugar have been the biggest lie I was ever told.

But here's what I propose to you HN reader: take 30 days. 30 measly days, eat eggs, meat and dairy. No grain, no processed shit. Give it a try and see how you feel. Ignore the rest.

Buttons8408• 4 years ago

Give it a try and see how you feel. Ignore the rest.

Remember that how you feel isn't the same thing as your long term health risks. My belief, and that of mainstream science, is that this diet will raise your cholesterol and increase your risk of heart disease. You won't be able to feel your heart health worsening until things are very bad. It might be a trade-off some people want though.

sergiotapia2• 4 years ago

Get your blood work done at regular intervals and confirm that fear. I've seen a lot of people show impressive bloodwork results online. But again, don't believe internet randoms, just talk to a doctor and get your blood drawn. See for yourself.

ffsoftboiled2• 4 years ago

But cholesterol doesn't increase the risk of heart disease. That was bunk science when it came out.

pfdietz2• 4 years ago

The effect of statin drugs on your cholesterol would utterly swamp any putative effects of dietary fat. Also, how is dietary fat bad but the fat synthesized in your body from excess carbs good?

DAVer984• 4 years ago

Without sugar which sticks to artery walls like little daggers, the cholesterol itself cant stick to artery walls fortunately.

ffsoftboiled2• 4 years ago

Been on it for a year - the benefits are amazing.

pfdietz2• 4 years ago

If you have or had elevated blood sugar, also consider combining that diet with a regimen of metformin. It's cheap, it reduces blood sugar, and it helps with weight loss. It's a prescription drug, but it's long since off patent.

frontman1988• 4 years ago

Been on carnivore for 10 days now

10 days to evaluate a diet seem low. Not many people in the history of humanity have had a pure carnivore diet, there's a reason we have evolved longer intestines than carnivores. Another interesting fact is that the inuk people who have mostly a carnivore diet due to inability to farm in the artic, live 15 years shorter than the average person in the developed world. Omnivore is the way to go, not carnivore.

yamtaddle• 4 years ago

You can get similar results, at least in the short term, with most highly-restrictive diets, provided what's allowed isn't egregiously unhealthy (e.g. "eat only candy") which it almost never is.

I expect the main two mechanisms of action are that these diets tend to reduce total caloric intake (lower variety = lower interest in eating; less opportunistic snacking since what's on offer is often not allowed by the diet; and so on) and drastically reduce how much outright crap adherents eat.

DAVer984• 4 years ago

Actually the body switches to using Ketones (Fat) as fuel instead of Glucose/Sugar/Carbohydrates. Its a completely different system OP has switched to now.

RadixDLT• 4 years ago

surprize surprize, humans have been eating red meat for a million years

bogota• 4 years ago

Slams should not be allowed in titles here. It’s abused by journalists or editors who just want to make you feel angry instead of conveying a point. I question info from any publication that uses it

sinemetu11• 4 years ago

Did the author even read the abstract let alone the paper?

We also found that while risk for the six outcomes in our analysis combined was minimized at 0 g unprocessed red meat intake per day, the 95% uncertainty interval that incorporated between-study heterogeneity was very wide: from 0–200 g d−1. While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations.

Doesn't sound like it particularly slams years of shoddy research.

OJFord2• 4 years ago

Oh, but you won't believe what happened next.

Terretta• 4 years ago

Did the author even read the abstract let alone the paper?

The author has a different purpose in publishing as evidenced in the well crafted headline, as correlated with ratio of commenters here engaging on that headline w/o reading the abstract.

mritchie7122• 4 years ago

I did a good bit of research and experimentation on diet. Tons of conflicting studies. I just eat things that don't make me feel bad after eating them and hope for the best.

pessimizer5• 4 years ago

While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations.

Is this not a slam?

hinkley• 4 years ago

it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations.

So you're saying there's a chance...

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

This is a misleading headline. The study restricts its focus to unprocessed red meat, indeed the word 'unprocessed' appears 72 times in the study.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z

Furthermore, the study does not separate growth-hormone-treated and antibiotic-treated meat, which is widely considered to have higher health risks.

Similarly, there's no mention of food-borne illnesses due to microbial contamination, again a higher risk in combined and processed meat (hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage etc.)

"Approximately 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3000 die each year from foodborne illness. A ten-year study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 46% of these hospitalizations and 43% of the deaths to meat. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the primary federal agency tasked with regulating food, is aware of these statistics, and characterizes them as “largely preventable.” It is becoming clear that modern meat production methods allow pathogens to spread with ease, creating great food safety risks."

If FDA Does Not Regulate Food, Who Will? A Study of Hormones and Antibiotics in Meat Production (2015)

https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/0098858815591528

A single animal, raised on crops not contaminated with pesticides and herbicides, nor treated with antibiotics and growth hormones, and butchered in a food-safe manner with due regard for avoiding microbial contamination, is not a health risk.

This rules out, what, >95% of domestic USA meat production, at least?

warkdarrior• 4 years ago

The nice thing about such articles is that you can change the message without being incorrect.

"Approximately 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3000 die each year from foodborne illness. A ten-year study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 54% of these hospitalizations and 57% of the deaths to vegetables. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the primary federal agency tasked with regulating food, is aware of these statistics, and characterizes them as “largely preventable.” It is becoming clear that modern vegetable production methods allow pathogens to spread with ease, creating great food safety risks."

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

Even better, you can read the cited study, and look at the footnotes, and read the relevant citation:

"These percentages do not include illnesses and deaths caused by seafood. See John A. Painter et al., Attribution of Foodborne Illnesses, Hospitalizations, and Deaths to Food Commodities by Using Outbreak Data, United States, 1998-2008"

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/19/3/11-1866_article

Hospitalizations:

"An estimated 26,000 (46%) annual hospitalizations were attributed to land animal commodities, 24,000 (41%) to plant commodities, and 3,000 (6%) to aquatic animal commodities (Table 2). Produce commodities accounted for 38% of hospitalizations and meat-poultry commodities for 22%. Dairy accounted for the most hospitalizations (16%), followed by leafy vegetables (14%), poultry (12%), and vine-stalk vegetables (10%) (Figure 2, panel B). Among the estimated 57,000 hospitalizations, 8% were not attributed to a pathogen, mainly because the dataset did not include data for Toxoplasma spp.

Deaths:

An estimated 629 (43%) deaths each year were attributed to land animal, 363 (25%) to plant, and 94 (6%) to aquatic commodities (Table 3). Meat-poultry commodities accounted for 29% of deaths and produce 23%. Among the 17 commodities, poultry accounted for the most deaths (19%), followed by dairy (10%), vine-stalk vegetables (7%), fruits-nuts (6%), and leafy vegetables (6%) (Figure 2, panel C). Of the 278 deaths attributed to poultry, most were attributed to Listeria monocytogenes (63%) or Salmonella spp. (26%). Among the 1,451 estimated deaths, 25% were not attributed to a pathogen, mainly because the dataset did not include data for Toxoplasma spp."

The real conclusion here is that the food supply chain in the USA is poorly regulated and presents large health risks to consumers, and as the producers do not have to bear the costs of externalities (air and water pollution, increased disease, etc.) they are under no pressure to improve the situation.

Again, meat, like vegetables, fruits, grains, leafy produce, etc. - when produced under high standards (i.e. no pesticide/herbicide contamination, no hormones and antibiotics, no violations of food safety standards) is quite healthy to consume.

surement• 4 years ago

This is a misleading headline. The study restricts its focus to unprocessed red meat, indeed the word 'unprocessed' appears 72 times in the study.

reading the headline I had zero expectation that this applied to processed meat

HNDV• 4 years ago

Similarly, there's no mention of food-borne illnesses due to microbial contamination, again a higher risk in combined and processed meat (hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage etc.)

Have you read your own data?

study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 46% of these hospitalizations and 43% of the deaths to meat

The majority of foodborne illnesses do not come from meat. If you are observant, you would notice that a disproportionate amount of things like E.coli outbreaks are associated to salads served in fast foods. And much of the risk associated with meat comes from a lack of hygiene or under-cooked meat. Chicken is a high risk of E.coli when under-cooked but it's much less dangerous than a damn lettuce when it's well done.

Regardless of ingredients (meat or pure vegetarian) there's also too many illnesses contracted because employees of restaurants are severely lacking in hygiene. Gastroenteritis causing pathogens should have ceased to exist if people were not so disgusting, going to the toilet without washing their hands.

wes-k• 4 years ago

And of the hospitalizations and deaths not from meat, how many are due to animal agriculture? I believe most are due to cattle feces runoff into waterways.

wppick• 4 years ago

I think it's not so black and white. When you eat meat you essentially eat what the animal ate. Wild elk is going to be a different "red meat" from factory farmed beef that ate only low nutrition corn grown with pesticides

rdevsrex2• 4 years ago

I think it is still best to err on the side of caution for a number of reasons. One is that not all red meat is equal in quality. For example, beef from cafo's where they heavily does with antibiotics and mostly feed them corn and soy is not the same as grass fed and finished.

But another reason is simply your individual health profile. Most people know that the Inuit and other northern people's have adaptations to allow them to handle much higher levels of meat and fat. Maybe you can't handle as much as other people can.

I only read the abstract but I saw nothing about the risk of obesity and diabetes there, but clearly in rich countries, we eat too much meat.

Lastly there is the environmental reasons. We can't feed everyone the same amount of meat that we in the rich countries eat. So sooner or later we will have to get used to less.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

I’ve been listening to a medical history podcast called Sawbones. It’s funny how history rhymes so well. Every generation of health experts have had this sort of smug superiority about how the previous generations were such morons and, finally, they actually understand how things work.

But even today it’s obvious that’s simply untrue. Less fats and proteins, more grains? Way to go, food pyramid.

I’m not equipped to scrutinize this report on red meat. But I do know that they can be very very wrong and to be skeptical of any bold claim in any direction.

plaguepilled• 4 years ago

Inappropriately emotive language? In my HN link title? Cringe.

bobbobbobsteve• 4 years ago

I've been a vegetarian since I visited a slaughterhouse when I was 10 years old. I'll never touch meat again. I believe if more people saw what I did, they would stop too, but perhaps not. I'm an old man now and humanity keeps slipping down in my psyches' personal internal hierarchy of veneration, or to state it plainly, "People suck."

kuhzaam• 4 years ago

How has that worked out for you, in terms of health? Obviously it is anecdotal, but I'm still curious. I've been plant based for 5 years. Trying to determine if it is a life long thing for me or not.

moosey• 4 years ago

I'll answer. I have limited myself to vegan food for the last 17 years or so.

Buy good cookbooks. Bring your own food to things. That basically sums up our success sticking with it.

Health-wise, my health markers are extremely good. No B12 or iron deficiency. I attribute a ton of this success to consistent physical activity, though, particularly weight lifting.

Regarding physical activity, it comes easy, I am in way better physical health than the bay majority of my peers, if not for my asthma issues. I associate that, again, not with the diet, but with general physical activity.

Basically, the diet doesn't hurt, and statistically isn't likely to help you. The important part is the ecological cost of a diet full of meat, imo, or if someone eats enormous amounts of meat and ends up with a physical malady from it.

sweetheart2• 4 years ago

Vegan for nearly 7 years here. Got all my blood work back a couple months ago and I couldn't be healthier! I don't even know much about nutrition tbh. I eat a variety of things, make sure I get B12, and just try to eat green things at every meal. My body is healthy, my conscience is at ease, and I've never enjoyed food more.

rcarr• 4 years ago

Diet research seems like a wild goose chase and I'm not sure I trust much of it anymore. There are so many variables involved when it comes to human health that I fail to see how you can do any kind of accurate modelling on what is or isn't beneficial when it comes to food unless it has an obviously seismic effect e.g sugar, lack of vitamins and minerals etc. Whatsmore, it's plausible that something that may appear beneficial in the short term may actually be an imbalance that causes a long term response that isn't beneficial. Seemingly every food on the planet has a study showing it causes or cures cancer. Yes I'm being hyperbolic but you get what I'm saying. The whole problem is further compounded by Big $INDUSTRY funding and bribing scientists and whoever else to push $INDUSTRY_PRODUCT such as happened with the sugar lobby until recently.

People desperately want diet to behave like classical physics with an indentikit formula they can just roll out to everyone but it's just not the case. Everyone's body responds to different foods differently and even reacts to those same foods differently over time or in different situations. The only real way to find out is personal experimentation and observation.

0F52• 4 years ago

Dr Sean baker has eaten literally nothing but red meat, cooked rare to boot, for more than five years. He has perfect health. He hasn’t developed any of the pathologies that are caused by red meat or saturated animal fat according to the medical establishment. CAC score zero. Zero plaques in a survey of blood vessels in the eye balls. Nothing. The current model is wrong. Why is it so hard for people to wrap their mind around it?

karaterobot• 4 years ago

I would not base my decisions off a self-reported, unscientific experiment on one person.

0F52• 4 years ago

His labs are pretty hard data if you ask me. And there are many people who do it. And the evidence is overwhelming. Look at the cholesterol drugs that enzymatically transform LDL to HDL. They improved peoples cholesterol massively and it had zero impact on cardiac events. Zero.

bilsbie• 4 years ago

I wonder how much of a factor of how the meat was raised plays into this?

timbit42• 4 years ago

You are what you eat.

What you eat is what it eats.

silent_cal• 4 years ago

Statistical models are flimsy and misleading. I think anyone who has worked with them would admit that. Add or remove one parameter and the whole thing can change. Trusting any conclusion based on a statistical model is naive. The fact that scientific research relies on them so heavily is the main reason I don't "trust the science". It's a house built on sand.

Metacelsus• 4 years ago

The real concern is cured meats. Nitrosamines are terrible for you. Even "no nitrites added" meats will often have celery juice concentrate added, which contains lots of nitrites.

JeremyNT• 4 years ago

This title seems like clickbait. The linked article seems like mostly blogspam that's talking about a new meta-analysis with some specific claims, but it also sprinkles in a quote from an unrelated professor that makes some stronger claims.

Specifically, the study it leans on most concludes:

We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke. We also found that while risk for the six outcomes in our analysis combined was minimized at 0 g unprocessed red meat intake per day, the 95% uncertainty interval that incorporated between-study heterogeneity was very wide: from 0–200 g d−1. While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations. More rigorous, well-powered research is needed to better understand and quantify the relationship between consumption of unprocessed red meat and chronic disease. [0]

This conclusion is dramatically different from "not a health risk."

[0] https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...

ZoomerCretin• 4 years ago

_Unprocessed_ red meat. The study is very specific about this.

racl101• 4 years ago

Not as bad as processed carbs and sugars that's for sure.

Julesman• 4 years ago

Sure, and a spot of heroin won't hurt you either. No one EVER suggested that eating some meat was harmful. Then Americans and some Brazillians decided they could live on 100% steak. Yeah, no.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

It would take some extraordinary results, produced by a mere study nonetheless, to merit calling decades of actual research shoddy.

xnx• 4 years ago

New rule of headlines: Don't read any article that contains "slams" in the headline

coding123• 4 years ago

It turns out Leafy Greens are the largest health risk for catching bacteria. You can't even wash it out because the bacteria grows into the plant. My wife and I stopped eating any fresh greens lately. Might start again with Kale only because it's a fancier salad green probably sourced in small gardens.

purpleblue• 4 years ago

Just another example of medical misinformation or disinformation that has been propagated by our media and science community. How many times do we have to fall for the same trick and just fall for what we are told, hook line and sinker?

"Low fat diets are heart-healthy" was false, "high salt causes high blood pressure" was false, and now this "red meat causes cancer" is false. The same goes for "blue light causes sleep disruption" was shoddy science as well, conducted on 8 people with an average difference of 15 mins. Yet Apple and other phone manufacturers modified their settings because of this bad science that made its way through our society.

There was a time when people who disputed low fat diets by pointing to the Mediterrean Diet, and they were considered heretics.

This is why free flow of scientific information is vital to a well functioning society. Without it, we tend to fall into groupthink and we never advance our thinking. MY ENTIRE LIFE, I've been inundated with the idea that red meat caused cancer, especially burnt red meat, and at first I was scared, and then I started eschewing it, and I was right. I'm glad these scientists had the courage to go against the "accepted" view and every scientist should have the freedom to do the same without being castigated. That's one of the biggest problem we have in society today.

kwertyoowiyop• 4 years ago

“Slams” just cheapens the entire article. If you want me to take your article seriously, treat it seriously yourself.

xurukefi• 4 years ago

It always amazes me how controversial nutrition is. Almost 300 comments here on HN within 2 hours. This is basically like religion and politics.

class4behavior• 4 years ago

That was never a significant concern with regard to the push for lower consumption of meat anyway. If anything the entirety of your diet combined with your physical activity matters, not whether you choose to eat meat at all.

Water consumption, land use, and biodiversity loss are way more important than even our own health care. On top of that, market pressure will always enable abusive treatment and processing of the animal, which is what large-scale animal husbandry inherently is anyway, while climate change and the size of the global population perpetually accelerate the rise of the costs of and competition for our resources.

rrgok• 4 years ago

I'm always surprised that only we, as in humans species, need studies, books and other things to educate us on what should or should not eat. The processing unit is inside us and yet its feedback is unreliably or, at best, too late to change the course of action. Even when looking at food, my sense doesn't say anything about it suitability to my body and mind. Only rotten or gone bad food are repulsive to the senses.

And we are the most evolved species in this damn mud ball. I'm sick of it. From religions, cultures and science, everybody has something to say about the food we eat. But my body? Nope, almost nothing or too late, and that point you don't even know what caused the damage.

I see a cow and it just eats the grass all day. It is stronger than me. It weigh more than me. It might be less intellectual than me, but it is not less intelligent than me as far as nutrition science.

mr_johnson222• 4 years ago

“There is, however, more evidence for a health risk from eating too few vegetables. That is really the risk of a high-meat diet, those meat calories are displacing vegetable calories.”

Isn't a calorie just a calorie though? Or is this in regards to what comes alongside those calories?

blue039• 4 years ago

CICO is true at the highest level but not in general. The effect 200g of protein has on your body vs. 200g of carbohydrate (in particular insulin, ghrelin, etc) means not all calories are created equal.

Energy-wise, yes, but the devil is in the details. If I had to infer the meaning here it's that high protein = constipation = not good. Vegetable calories include fiber which is important to insure you're processing things efficiently. Additionally, good vegetables (unfortunately not the ones you can get at the store usually) contain lots of great vitamins and minerals. I would be curious if they mean a typical American chain store vegetable which demonstrably has almost no nutrition compared to it's natural counterpart.

2-718-281-828• 4 years ago

in one of lex friedman's more recent podcasts where he had jordan peterson as a guest, they both rave about red meat. peterson allegedly eats a steak for breakfast and for lunch and for dinner and lex is also doing something similar. not sure what to make of that, just came to my mind.

boringg• 4 years ago

I have spoken with one of the leading researchers of cholesterol in the US and he said if you have high cholesterol you should only eat beef once a year due to the inflammatory nature of beef.

I have cut out beef easily. There are a whole host of other reasons to not eat beef or minimize it in your diet. But I'd be curious who funded this research directly or indirectly.

acconrad• 4 years ago

If you want to skip the article and go directly to the conclusions of the research:

...given all the data available on red meat intake and risk of a subsequent outcome, we estimate that consuming unprocessed red meat across an average range of exposure levels increases the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes at least slightly compared to eating no red meat (by at least 6%, 3%, 1% and 1%, respectively). Furthermore, the conservative interpretation of available data is consistent with no association between consuming unprocessed red meat and the risk of subsequent ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke

In other words, very mild risk of _unprocessed_ red meat consumption.

Here's the thing - the culprit isn't the meat itself, it's the saturated fat within the meat. Fatty meats have more saturated fat, and the dose-response of red meat (which is generally higher fat than other meats) means it takes very little to hit general recommendations for saturated fat consumption (less than 10% of total calories).

Also it's hard to decipher what "processing" really is. Ground meat is processed. Bacon is really processed. But you have to cut up meat from an animal to make it packageable - this is all processing. What is "bad" processing of meat? What is "good"? Is there such a thing? Does the moment you cure the meat (i.e. bacon) make it "bad"?

This is how the general public is left with more questions than answers when research like this comes out. But if you stick to the canonical advice of eat lots of plants and a little bit of animal products, you're probably going to be okay. Keep saturated fat and sodium in check. Keep your fiber high. Don't smoke and don't drink to excess. Manage stress. Exercise. All that stuff in aggregate is what matters far more than a grass fed ribeye for dinner tonight.

DoreenMichele• 4 years ago

I don't like the title. It asserts a finding that wasn't actually found.

They determined that the science doesn't really support claims of red meat causing x, y or z health issue. That is not the same as finding that red meat is not a health risk.

The real conclusion: Nutrition science has a long history of poor methodology and cannot state much at all with much statistical confidence.

That conclusion should not shock anyone familiar with how most such studies get done.

1-6• 4 years ago

We'll get yet another new study that slams studies that red meat is still bad and contributing to climate change. Some things will never grow old.

tlarkworthy• 4 years ago

The vast contribution to greenhouse gases is well established though, so a preference to white meat is meaningful

nottorp• 4 years ago

So... if i live in a country without a beef tradition, where the beef is imported and -ing expensive and most people have no idea how to cook it... what am I supposed to do now? :)

norwalkbear• 4 years ago

Trust the science is not a phrase we should be saying. Always question the science

simonblack• 4 years ago

Red meat is the most efficient way of maintaining iron in the body. That doesn't mean you have to eat red meat all the time, but sufficient for YOUR body to have enough iron. Some people might get away with one iron meal a month, some others might need it 3 times week.

readonthegoapp• 4 years ago

This article has about 10 red flags -- the first one to jump out to me is this:

  And so, the researchers came up with the burden of proof risk function, a novel statistical method to quantitatively “evaluate and summarize evidence of risk across different risk-outcome pairs.” Using the function, any researcher can evaluate published data for a certain health risk, then, using the function, compute a single number that translates to a one- through five-star rating system.

A new statistical method?

Outside of that, the entire tenor of the article sounds like it's out of an EA journal. We don't do "studies" -- we do _real_ studies.

ok.

...site funded by Kochs. ouch.

sokre84• 4 years ago

This is part of the reason why people didn't trust Covid vaccines.

mikestaub• 4 years ago

More and more evidence is mounting that we should be focusing on our gut biome diversity, which is increased when eating a variety of plant-based foods. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33619379/

yboris• 4 years ago

The amount of biased interest, lobbying, and funding from the meat lobby / industry is stupendous. With all that as a background, we ought to be skeptical of studies that contradict the evidence of high consumption of meat being correlated highly with (and there's good evidence for causal pathways too of) adverse health outcomes.

He’s an Outspoken Defender of Meat. Industry Funds His Research, Files Show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-...

uslic001• 4 years ago

I have performed over 30 thousand colonoscopies in my career so far. I have never seen a piece of meat in the colon, but see rotting vegetables all the time as humans don't have a ruminant extra stomach like cows to digest vegetables/fiber. Meat gets a bad rap for no good reason. Processed meat is another matter as it is bad for you.

Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research

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