What if don't drink, don't smoke, do regular exercise, not obese... and eat lots of high quality meat? I haven't seen anything that comes close to showing that this would be unhealthy.
These studies are quick to point to conclusions. Remember that time where every "scientific" study pointed at fat as the big culprit behind heart problems? When it was sugar all along?
30 years later the narrative has become: all animal products are bad for you. Stop eating eggs and meat, and eat grains, it's better for the planet too!
People are getting duped, even on HN, it's depressing.
Since you're upset about the weakness of these studies, can you point to any that rigorously show any of the claims here? In particular that free range animals are somehow healthier to eat? Grain free next. Followed by the claim that fast food meat is inherently less healthy than meat I can obtain elsewhere.
None of the claims would surprise me if true, but there's a lot of commentary in this post about how flawed these studies are while making very strong claims about what is healthy (no carbs, free range meat, etc).
Getting Hugh quality data with enough power to separate out the effect of Big Macs versus lean steaks is really really hard. I imagine they are doing the best they can with the experimental techniques available to them.
That's why we need large interventional studies instead of observational ones.
Observational studies are interesting and sometimes necessary (e.g. when there's ethical concerns about running an intervention such as with smoking), but it's just way too tricky to separate out the impact of confounders especially when the treatment effects are rather weak (e.g. with coffee or meat consumption).
Most of the conclusions of large scale studies are not very solid and can often be dismissed with correlation is not causation. Your point is valid, but also very often popular health habits align with the view of what a healthy diet is in society. Therefore lower meat intake often is connected to more exercise, more sleep etc. Of course they often try to correct for it, but it still makes many of the conclusions debatable.
There is however one association that seems to hold up for red meat, whether that's a steak or a shitty burger, which is the connection between heme iron and certain form of cancers:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3261306/#:~:tex....
But at the same time the effect is still very small and not well understood.
The biggest problem, most people in the modern 1st world are lazy af. No change in diet is truly going to fix the lack of movement and lack of sun exposure. A 12 hour a day, everyday, call of duty gamer is equally unhealthy and useless whether herbivore, omnivore or carnivore in diet.
We really need to focus on how much sugar is in our foods both naturally occurring but most importantly in processed foods that are everywhere.
I have always operated under the idea that if you only use the produce, meat, and dairy, departments of a grocery store you can do a lot to improve your health. The largess of our society is that we have so many food options that are very easily consumed that many tend towards over consumption; as in no preparation required
Source?
Er no, people were told to stop eating fat but of course they didn't and average calorie intake went up in all categories. Sugar intake in the US peaked years ago but Americans are fatter than ever. Chicken and cheese consumption is through the roof.
Like the article says, being overweight is very unhealthy and almost any diet that keeps you from gaining weight is going to reduce your risks of a lot of illness.
The advantage of a plant based diet is that it's a lot kinder to the earth and to our animal cousins while also helping you avoid obesity.
To fix that, most successful diets rely on increasing the ratio of protein you eat (wether it's fish, meat or poultry). It gets you to the same satiety but eating less carbs, and you lose weight.
Now enter plant based / animal free diets, how are people gonna get to satiety without all that dense meat / fish / chicken?
If you're some amazing diet expert, I have no doubt you can figure out a way to get to satiety without relying on carbs. But most people, what are they gonna do? Just get two more slices of bread, or 50% more pasta.
If you strictly oppose a meat only diet VS a plant only diet, people will be leaner on the first one.
Beans like chickpeas and lentils, or grains like quinoa, have some carbs, but a lot more fiber. Cook them with a solid dose of olive oil and they're both healthy and filling. Or use coconut oil, which has more saturated fat (making it taste a bit better but be potentially a bit less healthy).
A few years ago my wife wanted to try the "plant-based" diet. I told her I don't care what I eat as long as it tastes OK, fills me up, and has enough protein. We did it for a month, and I never had any problems feeling full, and I definitely didn't load up on pasta. In the end she decided full plant-based wasn't for her, but we still end up cooking some of the plant-based recipes we picked up from that time few times a week.
It's the recipe / workflow thing that's really the issue. You can't just eat what you were eating before but without meat, and making imitation meat things is generally a recipe for disappointment. Making a good-tasting meal with beans or grains takes a shift in mindset and a shift in equipment if you're used to making food with meat. But once you get it figured out, it's fine.
I thought vegetarians were famous for eating lots of beans and tofu. Is this no longer part of the stereotype?
Refined sugar and carbs are high in calories and low in nutrients. If you eat 2000 (or appropriate for you expenditure) calories of brocoli, you ain't getting overweight.
Additionally, most people are addicted to sugar and refined carbs. Half the problem with diets is getting over that. It is likely the problem defined as satiety--but really just cravings.
We are just starting to get more Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials on diets and such. Will never be perfect, but there is just not enough highly controlled research as it is very hard to implement. But I think with keto, carnivore, vegan, paleo, all fighting to claim to be most healthiest diet, there are folks starting to put money into researching them on equal footing. So we will see.
I think to summarize Michael Pollan, eat whole food, not too much and mostly plants is probably a good bet on healthy diet.
This article [1] is a good writeup of the study (with the original study linked) and does a very good job at contextualizing the results and limitations, alternative viewpoints, and criticisms. My takeaway is, while a very interesting pilot study, the small sample size, lack of a control group, lack of an alternative group that ate the two diets in opposite order, possible confounding factors including exercise while outside the metabolic chamber, etc. don’t make this study any kind of smoking gun.
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/primarycare/dietnutrition/59012
Some people can’t wait for the data to come in, they’re suffering now, especially when special interest groups that want people to be vegetarian muddy the waters with agenda studies. All I can trust is how I feel personally eating different ways, and eating whole cuts of meat is keeping me from vomiting up my stomach acid in the middle of the night as my “completely normal stomach” (according to my doctor) tries to digest my trachea.
Legumes in particular are extremely filling: https://www.azumio.com/blog/nutrition/beans-skinny-food
There was a time when animal products were a lot more expensive and scarce. When you add more foods with water in them (provided you're not overloading those foods with fat and oils) you end up feeling more satiated.
Big salads? Fiber tends to make you feel full.
Also, let's take a look at the regions of the world that live longer. What do we find? Regions of the world that, in almost all cases, consume less red/white meat, sugar and fats comparatively. These populations almost universally eat more plant based food. Look at places like Japan, Singapore, Monaco. Is it just food? No. Stress, access to healthcare and other things also compound into the results. But you can almost guarantee where you find old, lucid individuals you're not finding fast food, junk food, highly processed food and stress.
Is red and white meat akin to smoking? No. But overconsumption of something that doesn't provide many essential vitamins, minerals, and fibers doesn't positively increase overall health.
As an aside, cheese consumption doesn't have to be bad since there are really delicious cheeses which have almost no fat but plenty of protein like the whole branch of "Harzer" cheeses with one example I buy and eat quite often being "Hausmacher"[0] (grinding a little bit of pepper on top of the cheese slices makes it even more delicious). Short summary of its contents by weight: 30% protein, 0.5% fat, <0.1% carbohydrates, which AFAIU is quite normal for sour milk cheeses.
Does it actually help avoid obesity? Many of the vegetarians I know are overweight or even obese.
https://jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(13)01113-1/abstrac...
Did it say how they measured BMI? Was it the lazy height/weight way or the real way? I can't see the full study due to a pay wall and it doesn't say in the abstract. I would also be interested to see if they had any selection criteria based on lifestyle (exercise and healthy food selections) and family history since it only mentions adjustments for age, sex, and race.
Also, I would like to see the BMI by subgroup. Based on their breakdown they are comparing omnivores to vegans but leave out the vegetarian and pesectarian results.
Here's one that compares a healthy Mediterranean diet with a healthy vegetarian one. The conclusion was that they are comparable.
Generally plant-based, means whole, unrefined, or minimally refined ingredients.
i.e. french fries, oreos are all vegan but are refined.
If this is the case, you are also more likely to be financially comfortable as this is an expensive diet. It just isn't possible if you are poor enough, but plenty of vegetarian meals based on beans, rice/grain, and vegetables are.
The narrative is factory farmed meat & dairy is not good for you, not good for the people working in that industry and it's not good for our biosphere, e.g. deforestation, pollution etc.
And of course it's absolutely bad for the animals involved, but most people don't care about animal welfare or don't even think about it.
If people must eat meat for whatever reason then the healthiest option would be to hunt or raise & kill your animals or buy from people who do, but it also comes with the associated price tag.
Reminds me of https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
I think the documentary "the game changers" addresses precisely that.
One of the authors of a cited study did a rebuttal here - https://ketogenic.com/debunking-the-game-changers/
The main argument that game changers proposes is a rebuttal to a long history of meat eaters and the meat industry claiming you need meat and dairy to be an athlete. That's false, and that's what the movie shows. There's also lots of benefits to eating a vegan diet and it showcases that as well.
The reason there aren't a lot of studies showcasing people who only eat grass fed beef that they killed themselves with cows they love is there simply isn't enough people doing that. Meat consumption leans drastically towards processed meats or bulk beef and chicken output. So naturally that's what these studies are targeting.
I believe you can make most diets healthy when adhering to rules of freshness, nutrient density, and a wide array of nutrients.
Just like how you can have an awful diet as a meat eater, you can have a awful diet as a vegan. It's not hard, just have white pasta with no vegetables and you have a carb dense vegan meal.
We don't need everyone to go vegan, but I think society would be better off if almost everyone (in America at least) believe they needed meat in the meal to feel full. We have an obsession with meat, but not in how it actually arrived to our plate, but in a don't ask don't tell philosophy. The general advice of "eat a lot of everything, mostly plants" is a good one and doesn't exclude meat and dairy, but it probably means to reduce your consumption. If you're someone who gets milk from your local farmer who also raises cows they have named and care for then you're probably fine, otherwise, don't think vegans are just crazy idiots, they may have a point.
Let’s sing this from the rooftops. I deeply agree.
Welcome to my world!. ( Not just HN really, it extends to most people on this planet)
One problem is there isn't enough high quality meat available - high fat red meat in particular - however there are trends developing including ketogenic, carnivore diets, etc - as well as people buying half or full cows (much much cheaper) and then freezing it; plus then you can actually meat [freudian slip pun, I'm leaving it] the cow and see how it's cared for, etc - tying into the benefits, value of local.
I mean there is just insurmountable evidence that fat is correlated to heart disease. What is so ironic is that some journalists with no medical backgrounds write a book about "The Big Fat Lie" and now it is sugar that is the cause with not much scientific research to back it up. Sugar is bad and inflammatory for sure, but mountains and mountains of research on fat and heart disease are somehow all wrong now?
Now it appears it's not that clear. It's the excess of sugar in everything that overloads your bodies temporary stores of glycogen in the muscles and liver, which is then stored as fat, since your body can easily transform sugars into fats.
To see how that looks you can track the obesity numbers in US, the more "0%!" fat products are propped up with suger over the years, the larger the obesity crowd.
I don't think the final word is out yet, but the _cause_ of fat in your body, is not necessarily the fat that you eat.
If you examine it from a thermodynamic perspective (I know that is simplistic for human biology), weight for weight fat has double the energy density of sugar, 38 MJ/kg vs 17 MJ/kg according to [0]. For reference, gasoline and diesel fuel are around 45 - 48 MJ/kg.
Also, according to [1], dietary fats are broken down to generate acetyl-CoA which is the precursor for lipogenesis (fat storage), therefore eating fat does not necessarily make you fat but consuming a lot of it and not metabolising it to do work will make it easier for you body to store fat.
Fat storage, is for sure related to becoming overweight and the cause of many ailments.
> BMI accounted for a substantial proportion
In the "Role of BMI" they also say that BMI isn't perfect to detect adiposity, suggesting even further that being fat is what you want to avoid.
> Finally, given the observational nature of this study, it is possible that there is still unmeasured confounding, residual confounding, and reverse causality.
Studying human diets is hard.
Coincidentally, industrial food producers have discovered that it is cheaper and more profitable to sell ground up peas and plant oil as “meat”, water rinsed through oats as milk, etc.
All of the “problems” with meat are market issues. Animal welfare issues are due to industrial farming practices, which will get worse if the industry declines. Land use and environmental issues are all about the market conditions, which are literally putting sustainable meat and dairy business out of business.
The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives.
> The “solutions” of fake substitutes are PR driven narratives.
I think you are looking for a conspiracy where there is none. Those newer alternative meat products are not the basis of a healthy plant-based diet - they are treats that actually are marketed towards meat eaters. Ask any veg/ans you know what they eat as staples; it's not expensive Impossible or Beyond burgers, but tofu, tempeh, beans, legumes, and seitan.
I also doubt that the problems with meat can be fixed at its current scale. A trope in the vegan community is every meat eater has a neighbor raising organic grass-fed cattle on acres of land that he lovingly slaughters.
The reality is, almost all animal agriculture in the US is factory farming style CAFOs.
[0] "Using data from the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture, which was released this month, it is estimated that 70.4 percent of cows, 98.3 percent of pigs, 99.8 percent of turkeys, 98.2 percent of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat are raised in factory farms"
Cattle especially are not grass fed, they are stuffed with corn, soy, and other food grown at a rapid clip with petro fertilizer. There is not enough grazing land in the country to produce meat at the scale it's consumed here.
[0] https://plantbasednews.org/culture/factory-farms-study/
You can dive into the USDA numbers yourself here.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/Full_Re...
It is much cheaper to operate a couple of large national-scale factories to produce plant-based meat alternatives with mostly automated equipment and minimal regulatory oversight. Meat processing either needs to be regional, which is higher cost, or national, where limitations or capital costs of automation require a large pool of unskilled labor. You "fix" factory farming by enforcing labor standards at the processing layer that make concentrated, high throughput meat processing uneconomic. The result would be changes in how the industry functions and higher prices. (ie. market forces)
Those same market forces would ultimately drive more plant-based calories in diets and probably healthier eating habits. Factory farms exist because USDA policy since the 70s have been focused on slowing inflation in food prices. That policy ultimately drives alot of unsustainable practices, from factory farms for livestock, to the long-term depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, to the transfer of topsoil from the Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio river watershed to the Gulf of Mexico. 50-100 years from now, our descendants will be returning to regional agriculture at very high cost as midwest production fails and climate change breaks the environment the supports the magnificent bounty of the California central valley and Colorado watershed.
This whole paragraph is exactly right, and exactly why factory meat is set to rapidly lose market share to plant-based substitutes. The market forces are unstoppable.
I'll add that the lesson of COVID's meat processing labor disruptions will not be lost on retailers and retaurant chains.
"Of the 1,315,051 farms with livestock, 18 percent (237,821 farms) were farms with confined livestock types (i.e., farms with 4 or more animal units of any combination of fattened cattle, milk cows, swine, chickens and turkeys, or appeared to be raising veal or heifers in confinement). These 237,821 farms accounted for $79 billion in gross livestock sales, which was 80 percent of gross livestock sales for all farms."
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/?cid=nrcs14...
I don't quite follow.
What happens to businesses with fixed or declining demand? Consolidation.
The bigger players start scooping up the weaker ones. Bigger players have more regulatory muscle. There are a thousand examples... aircraft is probably a decent one. You used to have Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell, Douglas, etc... Now you have Boeing as "Team USA", who has the political and market power to do things like ship airliners that crash for avoidable reasons.
But I'm assuming he means that with a reduced demand for meat, it would mean that factory farms are going to have to find ways to reduce costs. And they're already doing their best to operate at the bare minimum. So any cost cutting measures will come at the expense of animal welfare.
We want the cheapest meat - don't care how. Caring for an animal's welfare is counter to that.
If demand for meat goes down it means environmental damage is reduced and fewer animals have to be born, which means fewer animals have to suffer.
I don’t really buy it.
You just have to ask yourself why AG-GAG laws exist.
Oat/Soy/Almond milk in most cases is a sugary flavored drink with a little less sugar than a soft drink. It's marketed with dubious health claims as a substitute, including paid placement on dairy shelves to imply that it is in fact a dairy product.
We call Coffeemate "non dairy creamer", Yoohoo a "chocolate flavored drink", SunnyD "orange drink", cut-up whitefish with red dye "imitation crab". Why should oat water be any different? Why is it important for the private equity people who own Oatly, or the Diamond Nuts people who own Califa, or Coke and Pepsi to market nut/oat based products as milk?
>> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
>> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As a personal recommendation not endorsed by the HN guidelines, I suggest responding to the point a commenter is actually making, rather than a point that is often made on the same "side" of an issue, but that that particular comment is not currently making. Specifically, the comment above said nothing about product naming "fooling" anyone.
>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I stand by my comment. It is a good response to what they said. I cited multiple examples of the same thing happening commonly in food naming to prove how their argument thta this is some PR narrative is wrong.
Edit: this is clearly different from a company marketing a product alternative, such as margarine (for butter) or Impossible Burgers (for ground beef).
Why would they? Do frankfurters contain frank? Do danishes contain da?
There's a big difference between someone who eats a lot of high quality meat with no regard for pricing and someone who lives who gets meat consumption from cheap canned goods. I would guess the latter has a higher rate of obesity.
"Positive association" doesn't mean that there was an association with a "positive", as in "beneficial" result.
The study found that this positive association with health risks was "attenuated" (read: reduced across its range) after adjusting for BMI, meaning there is also a positive association with BMI that confounds the effort to draw a firm conclusion from the studied data.
This is clarified further in the rest of the paper:
Role of BMI
In the present study, most of the positive associations between meat consumption and health risks were substantially attenuated after adjusting for BMI, suggesting that BMI was a strong confounder or possible mediator for many of the meat and disease associations. BMI is an important risk factor for many of the diseases examined (e.g. diabetes [7]). BMI was highest in participants who consumed meat most frequently, and some previous studies have found that high meat consumption is associated with weight gain [56, 57], but it is unclear whether this indicates any specific impact of meat or an association in these populations of high meat intakes with high total energy intakes. The associations of meat with disease risk reported here which remain after adjustment for BMI might still be due to higher adiposity, because BMI is not a perfect measure of this characteristic; we observed similar effects when adjusting for waist circumference (results not shown), but, as with BMI, waist circumference is not a perfect measure of adiposity and there could still be residual confounding.
I guess sugar does not create CO2 while it grows so (it binds Carbon), so political idea is to create a narrative that will decrease usage of meat/dairy. But even if we all stop eating meat/dairy sheer number of people and population growth will again create CO2 emission in some other way.
> In multi-variable adjusted (including BMI)
So after correcting for BMI, meat consumption is still bad.
The summary says "higher BMI accounted for a substantial proportion of these increased risks suggesting that residual confounding or mediation by adiposity might account for some of these remaining associations"
That means that a substantial proportion of the increased risk is explained by a higher BMI. Unfortunately the summary doesn't say how much "substantial" is.
Ten percent are active smokers and the alcohol numbers look really high to someone like me who never drinks.
What I want to see are numbers where people with healthy habits who consume meat and their outcomes. This means no measurable smoking or drinking. When there are some truly adverse numbers associated with smoking and drinking it really needs to have those risk factors removed as much as possible to get good results.
> Higher unprocessed red meat, processed meat, and poultry meat consumption was associated with higher risks of several common conditions; higher BMI accounted for a substantial proportion of these increased risks suggesting that residual confounding or mediation by adiposity might account for some of these remaining associations. Higher unprocessed red meat and poultry meat consumption was associated with lower IDA risk.
So basically 'Red meat is fine but we found a correlation between heart disease and obesity'?