There was literally a reality TV show in England based around how terribly inaccurate food diaries are. It's on YouTube[2].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4527547/figure/...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=secret+eaters
Funding
This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, Our Planet Our Health (Livestock, Environment and People - LEAP) [grant number 205212/Z/16/Z]; Cancer Research UK [grant numbers C8211/A19170 and C8211/A29017]; and the UK Medical Research Council [grant number MR/M012190/1]. AP-C is supported by a Cancer Research UK Population Research Fellowship [grant number C60192/A28516] and by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF UK), as part of the WCRF International grant programme [grant number 2019/1953].
They also have a brief explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGpjeyypKMU&feature=emb_logo
I'm not going to call this a nefarious conspiracy, but in the same way you might wonder about a study funded by Coca Cola, LEAP doesn't sound like they'd want to fund a study concluding "eating beef is much healthier than soy protein"
If you combine that with the original criticism about the poor study design, you can come to your own conclusions about whether to reduce your meat consumption.
I'm not sure whether Wellcome has a similar real or perceived conflict of interest. I did think it was interesting that they showed a lower instance of Afib and varicose veins across the meat eaters...
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Gran...
If Bill Gates was that desperate to control what you eat, I'd suggest he could find more effective ways than funding completed unrelated work specifically at the Wellcome Trust starting a decade ago, in the hope that one day he could use his connections to pressure them to give a modest amount of their own money to a study that will likely not have any major impact politically.
This looks to me like a desperate attempt to find an agenda where there isn't one, verging on constituency theory terrain.
Why are people so comfortable with billionaires telling them how to live?
Has it occurred to you that billionaires can be using their resource for good? In your cynical world nothing can ever get done because ordinary people don't have the resources to do good, and the people who are resourced and want to do good are shooed away because people like you
> and most of the positive associations observed for meat consumption and health risks were substantially attenuated after adjustment for body mass index (BMI)
> 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
The numbers in the abstract should control for BMI (but not adiposity, i.e. bodyfat percentage). They're probably also too high.
To clarify: I'm 100% in agreement with you. I think meat gets a bad rap for bad reasons (one of them being bad science). I just wanted to point out this study did some effort (even if they could have done more) and that does deserve to be said.
In this case in particular they control for BMI. If eating less meat is helpful in lowering BMI, this effect isn't captured by this result. So you have to watch out for this when taking conclusions from a study or making decisions (if you already have a low BMI then you can trust the conclusions better).
> Despite the media headlines, the results from this Austrian cross sectional survey provide no proof that vegetarians are in poorer health than meat eaters.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200427104728/https://www.nhs.u...
I have to be mindful that I make myself eat a steak once in a while. On a regular day my skin lacks a lot of colour these days. If I forget to eat the right things I start to fog up, emotions waver, mood falters, and can even get clumsy. (Couple this with some latent pancreatic problems and it's worse)
The unfortunate thing about it, is it tends to progress even if you're making an effort unless you're making enough of an effort and it can be so creeping and insidious as to leave you unaware until you've done irreparable harm to yourself, either by diet or a physical defect.
Horrible stuff, this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559316/ (read: your body will more or less start falling apart)
For one, nutritional studies tend to point to whole foods being the way to go to gain the nutrients required by your body because of the vastly complex interplay of absorption and the related catalysts. And in many cases, it's easy to overdo it on specific vitamins, especially when they're isolated and concentrated. (https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h..., https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/WYNTK-Consumer/)
Secondly, I'm not sure what your first statement is intended to mean. When I eat meat, it's from usually chickens, turkeys, some fish, crustaceans, and occasionally western pig and cow (and even more occasionally, game animals).
As always, it's something each person should go over with their doctor—especially vegans or vegetarians who don't want to begin (or return to) eating meat.
B12 is synthesized by bacteria, algae and yeasts, not directly by the animals we eat. There's a theory that due to the conditions that most animals are farmed in nowadays - the environment and standardized and monotonous feed - they would be B12-deficient themselves if not for supplementation.
So most of the B12 you find in factory-farmed animals might be from supplements in animal feed. Just like how farmed salmon and eggs have a nice color because of supplementation. Check this out: https://nutrition.basf.com/global/en/animal-nutrition/use-ar...
More simply, the mechanisms involved in uptake by eating beef that received a B12 supplement is still very different from directly supplementing so the comparison should never be drawn.
As an aside: I would be skeptical of any chemical company's recommendations to the agricultural industry at large...
https://www.dsm.com/anh/en_US/products/vitamins/vitamin-nutr...
It is apparent to me from living life that meat is a big part of a healthy diet. But it can be frustrating seeing studies such as this one come out and not knowing what to believe.
I recently started dating a vegetarian and am really realizing how much harder it is to eat a healthy vegetarian diet. Since no one actually wants to eat nothing but greens / veggies all day, many of her meals are carb heavy to fill up, with little protein. I'm not saying you can't be a healthy vegetarian - but it's harder. There are no good meal analogues for something like grilled chicken with a sweet potato/veggies on the side.
[1] As with all traditional practices, partial adoption may result in loss of any amount of the benefit, including amounts greater than 100%.
Or maybe there’s no reason to believe that a diet that’s healthy for Indians is necessarily healthy for Europeans or vice versa.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6043908-beef-and-liberty
The leader of a wolf pack gets first pickins at a kill, and it always eats the liver first.
Large carnivores elsewhere eat organs first as well.
There's a growing body of research for something that's being called the "carnivore" diet, and there's a sub-movement called "eating nose-to-tail" that seems to be, as best as I can tell, led by a physician named Dr. Paul Saladino, M.D., although the usual suspects are always on his podcast, or he's on theirs and/or associated with him: Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, Dr. Shawn Baker, M.D., etc.
Its basically exactly what you would expect... eating a lot of heart, liver, kidneys, along with skeletal muscle, etc.. I tried to do it, but I love things like french fries, roasted potatoes, roasted Brussel sprouts, etc. way too much. The biomarkers on this diet look amazing, but its always the same "problem". The people who are evangelical about eating this way are also huge into fitness, oftentimes spending an hour or more a day exercising.
I'd like to see 100 total lazy fatasses on a nose-to-tail carnivore diet and 100 total lazy fatasses on a vegetarian diet for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years, and do weekly workups on them... blood pressure, fasting glucose, post-prandial glucose, and so on.
That being said, it sucks. I tried it and I couldn’t do it. Not eating any of the foods you like fucking sucks. And the adjustment period is brutal, with nausea and watery stools. Electrolytes are a constant problem. Once you get past the one month mark it’s supposed to level out, but I’ve never been tough enough to last a month.
Yeap, everything you just said here was exactly my experience too.
[1] - https://shop.ancestralsupplements.com/collections/frontpage/...
Now that may be because of your top point, most of the meat consumed in the US is processed in some way. I think the biggest culprit of meat-related cancer (?) is preserved meats.
I don't know. I just wanted to admit to being a little shocked at the whole vegetarian/cancer link. You often hear the opposite of that.
I mean potato chips are vegan. French fries are vegan, etc.
The key is whole foods. Unprocessed foods.
[0] https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/blog/the-sick-quitter-effec...
Don't know if that's a representative sample of vegetarian/vegan population, but it's not unlikely the case. Hence, the link between the veg* diet and cancer is not hard to imagine.
The main issue with (a lot of) these research papers, other than having bad data to begin with, is the lack of control for other parameters: what exactly do those surveyed meat-eaters and vegetarians eat, and what their lifestyle choices are (e.g., vegetarians are generally more health-conscious, so they often exercise, don't smoke/drink as much, etc.).
In my observations (I'm in the US) this statement is true of the majority of the population, including omnivores. 2/3 of the US didn't become overweight (1/3 obese) by being mindful of their diets.
There are a lot of vegetarians in India on traditional diets that don't include highly processed foods with added sugar. I think it's safe to say that most Indians eat vegetarian food most of the time. Meat is just something most people in India can't afford everyday.
For me it was for standard 'moral' reasons and so eating junk food is still acceptable.
Eventually I picked up the health reasons angle (and discarded all the junk food) and moving to mostly a plant based diet (mostly vegan).
https://jacknorrisrd.com/austrian-vegetarian-study-making-wa...
My favorite trivia here is a study which documented that, of people who self-describe as "vegetarian", one third will admit to having eaten meat in the past one (1) week.
A week has 21 meals. If you eat 3 types of food per meal, you will make 63 food choices per week. A person can choose meat for one of those 63 choices (1.6%) and still be a vegetarian. Many folks choose meat for 30% or more of their diet.
Eating meat 1.6% means your NOT a vegetarian, it just means your 'mostly' vegetarian.
I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with people eating meat, but most vegetarians I know (myself included), who are in it for moral reasons would take offense at that definition.
Maybe a lot of people want to try and be a 'vegetarian' (I dunno to sound cool?), try it for 3 months and fail constantly. These aren't vegetarians, just pretentious.
I've been a 'veggie' for 25 years and I haven't eaten meat, nor anyone else who I know who are.
People have no clue about how frequently they eat meat. Since vegan and vegetarian diet are gaining traction, everyone is pretending they're being careful and eating less meat than before, yet the global meat consumption is still increasing.
> In Model 1, we estimated hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) adjusted for race, Townsend deprivation index [20], education, employment, smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity, and in women, we additionally adjusted for menopausal status, hormone replacement therapy, oral contraceptive pill use, and parity. In Model 2, we further adjusted for total fruit and vegetable intake, cereal fibre intake score (calculated by multiplying the frequency of consumption of bread and breakfast cereal by the fibre content of these foods [21]), oily fish intake, and non-oily fish intake. For Model 3, we added adjustment for body mass index (BMI).
> Our results revealed that a vegetarian diet is related to a lower BMI and less frequent alcohol consumption
Wouldn't you say lower BMI is healthier?
Bill Gates spends lots of his money trying to develop technologies such as clean burning stoves for developing countries, inexpensive toilets for the same, funding advanced nuclear technology. How is this shoving it down our throats?
Your single sentence is brimming with emotion: belittling him with the batman moniker, shoving it down our throats, whatever the fuck, scare quotes. HN has higher standards than this.
You have to look at things that he wants to be applied by force, not things that he "generously creates and you can optionally use it".
If I want to eat meat and Bill wants to raise taxes on meat by force (using his billions so I pay higher taxes on meat) then I don't see this being a good thing for me.
If he makes cheap soy-lent so people can drink it and rest in peace, then it's ok by me. But he is forcing soy-lent to me too.
You're clearly brimming with emotion, and you seem to have drawn your own conclusion that bill gates is forcing you to stop eating meat. I'll be honest, that's a new conspiracy theory that I've not heard.
Why don't you think about it logically. What would Bill gates, a man who statistically only has 13 more years to live, gain from stopping you from eating meat?
You will slowly see the influence. Bill Gates is going in that direction. It is just too much man, he is going too strong at it, motherfucker appearing in every news about the virus.
> You're clearly brimming with emotion, and you seem to have drawn your own conclusion that bill gates is forcing you to stop eating meat.
It's "let's hear what Ja Rule has to say about this" up to level 9000!
> and yes in fact I have a powerlifter vegan friend.
Yes I have a black friend.
> Why don't you think about it logically. What would Bill gates, a man who statistically only has 13 more years to live, gain from stopping you from eating meat?
The issue is that people think differently. A simple exercise to you: Go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorde... and read a little about it. Now, think logically, thinking & behaving like that doesn't make sense. Yet, there is a % of the population that does.
Give somebody with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor... billions of $, at the end of their life, and they are at your throat.
He is the Microsoft scenario, he isn't good. He just profits, his ego, he gets excited doing this, his NPD, whatever, but he isn't good. He can't be. Can't save the world by force a be a good guy at the same time even if it was true.
Those don't sound very forceful to me. When you said "by force" I was expecting him to have Men With Guns raiding the houses of meat eaters.
Does that not seem problematic to you?
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...
Results are different, often opposite, in countries that have a better relationship to meat, like the big Austrian food survey study from 2014: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917888/
> Moreover, our results showed that a vegetarian diet is associated with poorer health (higher incidences of cancer, allergies, and mental health disorders), a higher need for health care, and poorer quality of life.
Other survey data across several countries often replicate the meatless = lower mental health claims, eg: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2020.1...
(This should come as no surprise to people who have read about B12 and mental health, which is a relationship so extraordinary that I'm surprised its not more front-and-center.)
But again, food survey data is generally bad. Some are okay, when they are very focused, like the Swedish studies on dairy product consumption. But most of them are bad, and the more general, the worse they are.