Is Red Meat Healthy? Multiverse Analysis Has Lessons Beyond Meat

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/red-meat-healthy-multiverse-analysis-has-lessons-beyond-meat-2024a10008qv

by andromaton • 2 years ago

40 75 2 years ago

tomohawk2• 2 years ago

One thing about these red meat studies is that they do not discern those who are on a carnivore diet (no plants - no alcohol, no sugar, no grains, etc) and those who have red meat as part of a mixed diet.

Having been on a carnivore diet for a while, and seeing many medical problems resolve that had not resolved with many medical interventions by doctors, it would be great to see more studies take a look at this.

dumbfool666• 2 years ago

How do you get fiber?

tomohawk2• 2 years ago

My dogs have a carnivore diet and their poops are firm and regular. Much better than when they were on premium dog food. Their fur is fuller, they have more energy, and yet they are more at ease.

It's an analogously similar situation with me. Haven't missed the fiber one bit.

The transition takes a bit of planning as there are initial side effects since your body is used to digesting and getting energy from sugar instead of fat. This video is a good start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3wzDWW1MdI

monero-xmr3• 2 years ago

Your body isn’t really digesting plants. It’s getting what nutritional value it can out of it and then pooping the rest out. Mostly it becomes fiber, which is good for you, but it is not going to provide real value like meat does. Meat is the key to a healthy diet.

zeta0134• 2 years ago

Doesn't this depend heavily on the plant? Lots of vegetarians seem to be able to put together a perfectly balanced diet with no meat whatsoever. (Seems like rice and beans are the key here. Mushrooms are also quite tasty, depending on whether your definition of "plant" extends to fungi.)

lm284692• 2 years ago

Vegetarians can eat eggs, milk, yogurt, cheese, &c. It's extremely easy to hit all your macros and nutrients on a vegetarian diet

Vegan diets are another story though

lm284692• 2 years ago

Meh, you can get all you need from a vegetarian diet, it's been prove over and over and over again

The real question if you want to stay healthy is what meat and in what quantities.

300gr of fresh ground beef every other day from the local bio farmer isn't the same as ultra processed bear shaped ham* at every meal.

* https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRkM8VO...

jajko• 2 years ago

Ground beef wouldn't be usually the best quality, bio or not. Bio category isn't perfect, farmers try to hack around it. We have sometimes really good meat grounded for burgers here in Switzerland, but thats a rare exception.

frankhorrigan2• 2 years ago

Getting what nutritional value it can and pooping out the rest is just literally what eating is.

rcxdude2• 2 years ago

I think the point is in comparison to some animals, we don't extract the full amount of nutrition available in plants (which requires a much larger gut and more energy digesting).

xandrius3• 2 years ago

Whole swats of populations go without touching any red meat (or any meat whatsoever) and be absolutely fine, some say faring even better.

Then if someone is personally addicted to meat and/or cannot enjoy other non-animal products providing the same nutrients then it's another topic. But let's not make incorrect statements, red meat is not key to anything.

salad-tycoon2• 2 years ago

If I throw a bowl of scraps to my chickens or dog or cats they go for the highest value things first which is meat and fat. Only after everything has been pecked and licked do any of them consider carrots and lettuce.

Meat provides many vitamins and nutrients in a highly bioavailable form. No one is addicted to meat. It’s a great nutrient delivery vehicle and looking at how many ways we have invented to cook it and increase its digestability it must have been useful. Grains and plants seem to be fillers to a main meal, throw in a bunch of vegetable matter in a pot with stringy meat to make it go further is how many poor people eat and the reason for the beans and rice. Any family that can afford to throw in some chicken legs or entrails or even muscle meat is going to do so into those beans and rice.

In one of the third world countries I lived in they would often tease people who could only afford beans rice and plantains because it was noted they were not as intelligent. Anecdotal sure but a common sense wisdom found in different and less affluent areas.

Furthermore, I can take your argument and use it the same. Eg Many people don’t eat vegetables, they only eat meat, and they are doing fine and many say they are doing better than ever. Let’s not make incorrect statements, vegetables are not key to anything.

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

One of my favorite books is

https://www.amazon.com/Crime-America-Cambridge-Studies-Crimi...

as it points out the limitations of the social sciences and generally why people don’t find science satisfying, particularly looking at it scientifically as opposed to “here is a paper I can use as a weapon to justify my dogma”.

In that book, researchers analyze just about every theory of the crime drop and got inconclusive results. The one exception was a chapter which was not quantitative at all but rather spun the story the black people in NYC switched from cocaine and heroin to passing around a blunt, sipping from 40s, and having a chill time.

rustcleaner• 2 years ago

... to passing around a blunt ...

Hey, whatever it takes to get the sage herb descheduled.

shrimp_emoji2• 2 years ago

Hey, IQ is 10 points lower in the West than in East Asia, but the West has much nicer societies.

DarkNova6• 2 years ago

The key sentence most are probably looking for is:

The median HR was 0.94 (IQR, 0.83-1.05) for the effect of red meat on all-cause mortality — ie, not significant.

However, the article (and the study) are absolutely worth a read. Another main take-away is:

I hope you read this paper and think about it every time you read an observational study that finds a positive or negative association between two things. Ask: What if the researchers were as careful as Zeraatkar and colleagues and did multiple different analyses? Would the finding hold up to a series of plausible analytic choices?

AwaAwa• 2 years ago

This approach ought to have been codified as part of an oath, with associated repercussions for the breaking of, but instead that which makes for popular sound bites from talking heads will carry the day.

What researchers chasing popular beliefs fail to realize is that once you chase popular opinion, your science and therefore you are suspect, not to mention the 'content' was never going to be as popular as the latest bowel movement of modern Ben-Hur.

Aesop's fable on the Bat, the Birds and the Beasts comes to mind regarding the fall out of this approach.

belter• 2 years ago

For all that prefer their scientific communications to start with the conclusions:

"Of the 48 analyses deemed statistically significant, 40 indicated that red meat consumption reduced early death and eight indicated that eating red meat led to higher mortality."

amelius• 2 years ago

Both can be true at the same time.

mattpallissard• 2 years ago

> They cannot both be right.
You know? You are also right.

Scipio_Afri• 2 years ago

So many things are lumped into red meat; highly processed meats with nitrates like hotdogs and organic grassfed beef both fit the definition. One is very clearly not healthy (due to nitrates) and the other has health benefits due to nutrients like creatine and b12 that can only be found in beef. I think if they could construct a study where red meat was more strictly defined and compared different types of red meat, that might eliminate some of this noise.

ofrzeta• 2 years ago

They should probably start with defining what "red meat" actually is. Personally I don't believe that fresh meat of various animals is unhealthy but I try to consume less to none of "red meat products", that is processed meat with nitrite curing salt.

hackernoteng3• 2 years ago

lot of these "studies" have included "processed meats" not fresh meat...

Tade0• 2 years ago

There's red meat and Red Meat.

Boars and pigs are closely related, but meat from the latter has twice the calories of the former - largely due to its extreme fat content.

I had to lay off red meat due to typical sedentary lifestyle induced health issues, but I found that the problem isn't exactly in the species consumed, but in the ridiculous amount of fat that's present in factory farmed animals.

On the flipside game meat is perfectly fine, even if expensive.

hackernoteng3• 2 years ago

you can also buy leaner cuts of meat. for example flank steak, etc. stuff that needs marinated or slow cooked, and has less fat. also grass fed steaks tend to have less fat (they aren't force-fed corn and soy to fatten them up)

klyrs2• 2 years ago

Whaaaa? My favorite indulgence is grilling flank steak blue and slicing it cross-grain. You slow cook it? Doesn't it dry out?

demondemidi3• 2 years ago

This should be a banned topic. There’s never any insight just righteous posturing.

beepbooptheory• 2 years ago

Data science should be banned?

shrimp_emoji2• 2 years ago

It's all bullshit, but I don't think bullshit should be banned -- there'd be no content left!

demondemidi3• 2 years ago

No, articles about red meat. Gives the vegans and the manly men a platform to shout at each other.

OutOfHere3• 2 years ago

Well, in the case of this analysis, the authors creatively left out at least two important studies that show harm from red meat, namely PMID: 19620159 and PMID: 32011623. I don't know the full extent of their bias in study selection, but it's evident to me that it's a creative way of producing any desired conclusion.

itsdrewmiller• 2 years ago

I agree meat is not a topic that draws very interesting comments generally, but the article itself is unusually good. It's funny seeing all the uncited bold assertations on a post about how even many studies in combination are not necessarily strong evidence.

demondemidi3• 2 years ago

All depends how you feel about observational studies vs randomized trials. Key word = "feel".

hackernoteng3• 2 years ago

All I know is I feel amazing eating lots of leaner red meat. The nutrient content is very high (B-vitamins, zinc, etc.) and hard to get elsewhere. I probably eat 5 lbs of red meat per week. Im in my 50s, fit, and have healthy bloodwork.

MPSimmons• 2 years ago

How much of that do you ascribe to genetics?

notnullorvoid• 2 years ago

I primarily eat vegetarian (eggs, and legumes for protein), but some meat every other day or so. I take supplements and ensure my diet is balanced. Something about meat and red meat in particular does make my body generally just feel significantly better though. More energy, clear headed, etc.

I've thought it might be due to in part to high metabolism. My entire family is quite slender and generally have trouble gaining weight.

xchip• 2 years ago

TL;DR:

"Zeraatkar and colleagues have shown that there are thousands of plausible ways to analyze the data, and this can lead to very different findings. In the specific question of red meat and mortality, their many analyses yielded a null result. "

zzzeek• 2 years ago

people who consume red meat are likely to be in higher income brackets hence have better access to healthcare and less stressful lives

abecedarius3• 2 years ago

Do you know that? In western countries the stereotypical confounder on nutritional epidemiology is that people who follow official guidelines like "avoid red meat" also follow other ones like "don't smoke". And this bias would go with your higher income, the opposite of the correlation you give.

ein0p• 2 years ago

Rejoice all ye faithful, the yearly flippening of whether red meat is good for you has arrived. Avail yourselves of steak before “scientific consensus” flips again a year from now.

OutOfHere3• 2 years ago

Even unprocessed red meat increases the all-cause mortality risk by 3%. Refer to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32011623/ which states:

Intake of processed meat (adjusted HR, 1.03 [95% CI, 1.02-1.05]; adjusted ARD, 0.90% [95% CI, 0.43%-1.38%]) or unprocessed red meat (adjusted HR, 1.03 [95% CI, 1.01-1.05]; adjusted ARD, 0.76% [95% CI, 0.19%-1.33%]) was significantly associated with all-cause mortality.

abecedarius3• 2 years ago

The paper we're discussing based its analysis on a bunch of published reports. Eyeballing its supplement Figure 1, about 4/5 of those reports gave a bottom line in the same direction as yours (increased mortality). But the OP paper arrived at a bottom line in the opposite direction.

I haven't looked further at either of these papers; just saying that telling me there's another paper which agrees with 4/5 of the other papers is not actually much information, in itself.

OutOfHere3• 2 years ago

They're using a very unproven analysis approach, although it's their biased study selection that worries me more. You can prove anything you want if you creatively select mainly the studies that favor your desired conclusions. They didn't even use the 2020 study that I linked. They also didn't use a famous study from 2009 (PMID: 19620159) which showed harm. These are just the two that I could identify quickly.

andromaton• 2 years ago

I found this interesting because of its multiverse approach not because it's about red meat. I would have found it even more yet separately interesting if the median HR was 0.1 or 10.

wwarner• 2 years ago

"Multiverse Analysis" is a terrible name, that can only introduce confusion, even if it increases readership. This methodology is more about machine learning than it is about covering all possible worlds. I'm also suspicious of the entire approach. In order to compare two different methods of analysis, you have to do some kind of mapping or weighting or meta-analysis that tells you why comparing two numbers makes any sense at all. This result must be tautological, in the sense that every expected value and variance can be computed and compared to another of the thousands of methods employed, and when we pour in the data it has to fall within the expected ranges, otherwise we know we've made a mistake in the original calculation.

Is Red Meat Healthy? Multiverse Analysis Has Lessons Beyond Meat

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