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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z</a>
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.<p>Specifically, the study it leans on most concludes:<p>> <i>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.</i> [0]<p>This conclusion is dramatically different from "not a health risk."<p>[0] <a href="https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-associated-consumption-unprocessed-red-meat-burden-proof-study" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...</a>
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.<p>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.
Did the author even read the abstract let alone the paper?<p>> 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.<p>Doesn't sound like it particularly slams years of shoddy research.
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.<p>> "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"<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01973-2" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01973-2</a>
This is a misleading headline. The study restricts its focus to <i>unprocessed</i> red meat, indeed the word 'unprocessed' appears 72 times in the study.<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z</a><p>Furthermore, the study does not separate growth-hormone-treated and antibiotic-treated meat, which is widely considered to have higher health risks.<p>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.)<p>> "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."<p>If FDA Does Not Regulate Food, Who Will? A Study of Hormones and Antibiotics in Meat Production (2015)<p><a href="https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/0098858815591528" rel="nofollow">https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/0098858815591528</a><p>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.<p>This rules out, what, >95% of domestic USA meat production, at least?
"Unprocessed" seems to be the key word that the headline skips, plus the one specific risk category. So basically the headline is a lie.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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."
From the first paragraph:<p>> red meat consumption is linked to colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease<p>I'm only a <i>little</i> deceptive here, because the study only found "<i>weak</i>" evidence of the above, so they did find some evidence.<p>So the study produced some evidence that aligns with previous research and somehow this "slams" previous research?
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. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z/figures/4" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z/figures/4</a><p>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 <i>processed</i> red meat, the subject of most of the headline-grabbing studies about health risks).
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Said the other way, getting to the individual level will have a massive impact on how we approach health and medicine.<p>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)?
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
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
>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.”<p>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.
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.<p>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.
If you want to skip the article and go directly to the conclusions of the research:<p>> ...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<p>In other words, very mild risk of _unprocessed_ red meat consumption.<p>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).<p>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"?<p>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.
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.<p>He’s an Outspoken Defender of Meat. Industry Funds His Research, Files Show.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-...</a>
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.
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 <i>for YOUR body</i> to have enough iron. Some people might get away with one iron meal a month, some others might need it 3 times week.
This article has about 10 red flags -- the first one to jump out to me is this:<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
A new statistical method?<p>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.<p>ok.<p>...site funded by Kochs. ouch.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>But even today it’s obvious that’s simply untrue. Less fats and proteins, more grains? Way to go, food pyramid.<p>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.
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.
Grain fed meat is totaly different than grass fed meat.<p>Grain fed animals have very high saturated fat amount compared to grass fed ones.<p>Grass fed animals and wild boars and wild cattle have much more PUFAs than grain fed ones.<p>So the quality of meat went down drasticaly in the last 100 years.<p>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.
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. <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33619379/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33619379/</a>
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.
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.
So, please provide a definition of ‘processed’. Like everyone says here, it is really not clear what that is.<p>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…
“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.”<p>Isn't a calorie just a calorie though? Or is this in regards to what comes alongside those calories?
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
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.
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? :)
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.
I don't like the title. It asserts a finding that wasn't actually found.<p>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 <i>red meat is not a health risk.</i><p>The real conclusion: Nutrition science has a long history of poor methodology and cannot state much at all with much statistical confidence.<p>That conclusion should not shock anyone familiar with how most such studies get done.
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?<p>"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.<p>There was a time when people who disputed low fat diets by pointing to the Mediterrean Diet, and they were considered heretics.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Grains and sugar have been the biggest lie I was ever told.<p>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.
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?