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Comment by Svoka | Hacker News Reader

This person clearly has strong believe in "meat is healthy" and tries to find proof of that, and provides multiple links to healthy meat blog posts. I mean, with such attitude one can confirm anything.

But for some reason overwhelming majority of scientists claim that consuming meat in quantities we do in North America is not good for health and environment on multiple dimensions: cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, infections, kidney disease, liver disease, cattle waste, deforestation and many others.

HH & authors attitude towards this article really reminds me some cringe movements like anti-vaxers or some other shit, where people choose what they want first and then find confirmation for it.

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I appreciate the skepticism. But you might want to look at the foundational evidence for meat-causes-(bad thing) health claims. It's all incredibly weak and confounded, and would never be considered evidence in other fields.

Please provide any evidence for your claim.

Nutrition epidemiology studies are not scientific experiments; they are wildly inaccurate, questionnaire-based guesses (hypotheses) about the possible connections between foods and diseases. This approach has been widely criticized as scientifically invalid [see here(1) and here(2)], yet continues to be used by influential researchers at prestigious institutions. Even if you think epidemiological methods are sound, at best they can only generate hypotheses that then need to be tested in clinical trials. Instead, these hypotheses are often prematurely trumpeted to the public as implicit fact in the form of media headlines, dietary guidelines, and well-placed commission reports like this one.

Tragically, more than 80%(3) of these guesses are later proved wrong in clinical trials. With a failure rate this high, nutrition epidemiologists would be better off flipping a coin to decide which foods cause human disease.

(1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2018.00105...

(2) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337

(3) https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...

Ref: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...

It's true it's not feasible to feed people in a clinic for 10 years to see if they eventually get cancer. What scientifically valid method would you recommend instead?

I have provided the evidence you requested for.

As there is no scientific evidence to prove that meat-causes-(bad thing), and as I share no such belief, theory or hypothesis why would I deliberatly want to set out to create an experiment to prove or disprove such a thing?

I like eating meat. I'm healthy eating meat. No scientific evidence exists to suggest the contrary. I would have to be pretty silly to waste my time trying to prove otherwise.

The World Health Organization found processed meats to be carcinogens.

Trumpeting to the world that meat causes cancer on the basis of these studies is ridiculously irresponsible and makes a mockery of the WHO. There is ample information to suggest that the WHO’s report is biased, incomplete, and scientifically dishonest.

Ref http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/meat-and-cancer/

I wouldn't call an additional reference from the same psychiatrist as the original article as a "ample" information. Here's one of the expert reference she cites:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24769880

It acknowledges the research connecting red and processed meat with cancer and suggests further study be performed to understand the exact mechanisms involved.

If you have any references from a second source that appears to discredit the WHO report, that would be more interesting.

So not meat, but as a result of chemicals added in the processing of meat.

Processed meats are unequivocally bad for you, but when you compare the data on that to unprocessed meat the link to harm vanishes. Conflating the two is deeply dishonest.

> overwhelming majority of scientists claim that consuming meat in quantities we do in North America is not good for health

Does your skepticism (which by the way does not really disprove anything what the scientist who wrote this article says, and rather simply tries to discredit it) also extend to these "overwhelming majority of scientists"? Because if it did you will understand that nutrition epidemiology studies are not scientific experiments; they are wildly inaccurate, questionnaire-based guesses (hypotheses) about the possible connections between foods and diseases. This approach has been widely criticized as scientifically invalid [see here(1) and here(2)], yet continues to be used by influential researchers at prestigious institutions. Even if you think epidemiological methods are sound, at best they can only generate hypotheses that then need to be tested in clinical trials. Instead, these hypotheses are often prematurely trumpeted to the public as implicit fact in the form of media headlines, dietary guidelines, and well-placed commission reports like this one.

(1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2018.00105...

(2) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337

(3) https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...

Ref: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...

Scientists/researchers in the past were paid by to say that sugar wasn't bad for you, and that fat was the culprit - we know this now to not be true.

There's research that emerging that is it's what you don't eat that - it's people who are eating meat + other bad things that causes problems and then allows the connection to meat as possibly being linked as the cause; there's barely any research of people just consuming meats and animal products.

Two videos I recommend everyone watch:

Dr. Georgia Ede - 'Our Descent into Madness: Modern Diets and the Global Mental Health Crisis' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlVfwJ6RQU

Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuj-oMN-Fk

Imaging meat is fine and it's when you hurt the body with other harmful foods that then causes your body to not function as well to process meat and other foods properly - and where other systems to clear/clean the body aren't or can't function optimally (think inflammation, insulin, excess of food/availability of calories, etc) - and not specifically because of the meat?

It's hard to know if oneself is ideology or propaganda, we've all been bombarded by things like government sponsored (influenced by food industrial complex) Food Pyramids, etc. our whole lives - or by fad diets looking to make money and marketing their own flavour of diet. The list goes on. Real research will happen that cuts through the confusion, people are waking up.

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