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Comment by jeremyw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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