Meat consumption and risk of 25 conditions: outcome-wide analyses of 475K people
bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com
bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com
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.
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].
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...
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.
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
> 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).
Does that not seem problematic to you?
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] - https://shop.ancestralsupplements.com/collections/frontpage/...
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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).
[0] https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/blog/the-sick-quitter-effec...
> 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...
https://jacknorrisrd.com/austrian-vegetarian-study-making-wa...
> 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?
> 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).
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...
https://www.dsm.com/anh/en_US/products/vitamins/vitamin-nutr...
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...
> 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'?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I don't quite follow.
I don’t really buy it.
You just have to ask yourself why AG-GAG laws exist.
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.
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.
> 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...
"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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Source?
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).
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
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).
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.
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.
Reminds me of https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
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.
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.
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.
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
Big salads? Fiber tends to make you feel full.
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.
I thought vegetarians were famous for eating lots of beans and tofu. Is this no longer part of the stereotype?
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.
Legumes in particular are extremely filling: https://www.azumio.com/blog/nutrition/beans-skinny-food
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.
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.
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.
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?
Fat storage, is for sure related to becoming overweight and the cause of many ailments.
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.
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.
Welcome to my world!. ( Not just HN really, it extends to most people on this planet)
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.
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.
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.
Humans and their lives are just too multi-variate, even with nearly ~500k people in a study.
All you end up with are correlations – I've basically never seen a study like this that manages to demonstrate causality convincingly.
I think the biggest problem is that they are not measuring low level molecular variables like metabolites, or abundances of gut bacteria. Hence, it's pretty hard to infer a causal chain. And since controlling for covariates is so hard, inferring something useful is difficult.
Especially when the purported effects are small/clinically insignificant.
To distill two of the most valuable things I've learned:
1. The Mediterranean diet seems to be the healthiest and closest to the Western and American diets, although its actual form has some key differences from the received wisdom. In particular, its pasta is a whole-grain variety and the fish consumption is less than once per day.
2. Most people are not fat-adapted and their bodies do a poor job of metabolizing fat! Typically this requires fasting or other forms of intermittent ketosis to get the body producing fat-burning enzymes. This is likely the source of a lot of conflicting info on fat. It's perfectly excellent for you - if you are fat-adapted, you will use it for energy and won't experience 3pm brainfog. But if you're not, it will very quickly create adipose tissue (body fat!) that continuously emits cytokines (poison) that sabotage your health.
3. Stress alters our metabolism for the worse! Since so many of us are stressed we're not performing proper digestion and not getting the right benefits from what we eat! Breathing exercises, etc. can help improve this.
It's a bit like what used to be called the 'French paradox' in that American observers mistook a tradition of rich foods as the constant ingestion of such food.
He was curious as to whether these groups of people, known to live a long time and even be healthy in their old age, had anything in common.
And they did.
They all exercised a lot.
They all had very strong social and community connections.
The all ate a mostly-vegan diet, punctuated with small amounts of animal product (in quantities varying from a portion every few weeks, to a few times a week but for only a couple of months of the year - for seasonal reasons).
He attempted to also prove, that taking any one of the above three commonalities away, was enough to invalid the results.
It's an interesting book, for sure.
Unfortunately, it has the terrible, baity title of: "Healthy At 100", and an even worse sub-title I won't repeat. But other than that mis-step (possibly at the hands of a publishing company), it's a good, well-referenced read.
It will be interesting to see if WHO revise its recommendations regarding meat consumption.
I mean a person can eat a hamburger a day and still be thin, in my experience it's the fries, coke, twinkies and pop tarts and stuff that make you fat.
(background section describes that in more detail)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15342453/
"Consumption of fresh red meat and processed meat seemed to be associated with an increased risk of rectal cancer. Consumption of chicken and fish did not increase risk."
(admittedly, that conclusion is a stronger statement than it should be. More precise: consumption of chicken and fish was not linked to increased risk, as they merely did not reject the null hypothesis.)
Some potential culprits are listed here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698595/
Loosely: curing, searing, heme iron (from blood; what gives red meat its color), fat content, and some other things that can't be summed up as nicely.
It's plausible that all of them contribute to some degree, leading to a more potent effect than any of them in isolation.
What I wonder is if adding heme iron to fake meat cf. Impossible Burger would reproduce the same effect.
I think the US especially would be far better served to appeal to people to reduce portion sizes rather than insist on industrialized plant based food. Minimally processed foods in smaller portions is far more sustainable and healthier than vegan radicalism and scientifically formulated plant-based edible substances.
My personal opinion is that we're so growth and value oriented - and that's fundamentally incompatible with a healthy diet.
Look at CostCo! They have an amazing amount of fresh, healthy meats and vegetables. But you're still walking out of that store with a twelve-pack of fish and the barrel of cheese puffs you saw on the way out. The majority of Americans simply lack the self control. The food production companies know this and take full advantage of it.
- Make food companies label non-organic food and say why they aren't organic, vs. making organic declare themselves, certify and therefore cost more. - Raise minimum grades on beef and poultry. Low grade meat is the only way to make large portions work economically. - Require food with meat ingredients to list what grade of meat is being used, hormone use, etc. - Disallow mixing of multiple animals in ground meat products... or at least cap it. Right now, fast food works because you can grind up hundreds of cattle at once.
It also complicates source tracing for any other problem - bad feed, importing rules, etc.
There are issues with our industrial food production particularly around meat. They should be addressed. I would be perfectly happy with lab grown meat if it was proven to be safe over time. I would prefer real meat without massive pollution or cruelty. But I'm not going to shift my diet to something proven to require pills to be healthy.
Just watch, the next phase will be trying to shame people for eating meat. It's only a matter of time.
Back when being atheist was a tough choice and being some kind of religious was the default choice I think there was more thoughtful people in the atheist camp.
Today as the tides turn one finds that the same annoying thoughtless people are atheists if that is the default.
Im the same way it doesn't surprise me at all that one find some of the healthiest people are vegerarians (or mostly meat), I think there's a huge overlap between those groups and those that generally think carefully about what they eat instead of just eating whatever processed food is cheap.
Going forward I think we'll see more unhealthy vegetarians.
The Impossible Whopper is no better or worse for you than a regular Whopper by any metric.
It is pretty easy to be a fat vegetarian today.
On days when we have time to cook, we make good, healthy meals. However, unhealthy alternatives are always present and very tempting.
The curfew has been hard for me and I have resumed my bad habits. I ate plant-based burgers, non-dairy ice cream, cookies and cakes almost every day. Most fast-food restaurants near me will ship from apps and offer meat-free alternatives for the same price.
Plant-based food is not necessarily healthier. It is simply meat-free.
- Harvey uses Lightlife burgers which are made with pea protein.
- A&W uses Beyond Meat which is made using beans along with beet juice for the coloring.
- Oggi's frozen pizzas made with Beyond Meat, cauliflower as the crust and vegan mozzarella (coconut milk).
- Coconut Bliss makes ice cream is using coconut milk.
- Cookies and bars made of fermented vegan proteins contains hemp, quinoa sprouts, alfalfa, spirulina, mung bean sprouts.
Those are all plant-based alternatives and are advertised as such. They are vegan junk food since they avoid animal products such as eggs and dairy.
An example of vegetarian junk food would be Quest's spinach & mushroom pizzas which use no meat at all but will use animal cheese.
- Whole foods describes natural foods that are not heavily processed. That means whole, unrefined, or minimally refined ingredients. - Plant-based means food that comes from plants and doesn’t include animal ingredients such as meat, milk, eggs, or honey.
I've mostly seen the term 'plant-based' to differentiate between stuff you probably shouldn't be eating (all vegrtarian: french-fries, potato-chips, oreos, beyond meat (heavily processed [1]), non meat pizza with real-milk cheese) to stuff you should be eating: fresh-fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts etc.
i.e. if what your eating tastes REALLY good, made by a robot, comes out of a box with lots of fat/oil, salt, sugar, then it's mostly likely not in the range of plant-based diet (AFAIK). Technically ketchup is a vegetable [2]! :)
Note: I'm not criticizing you for eating any of this, that's your choice, I think that a lot of evil corps are probably mis-labeling these products as pseudo healthy (and maybe they are compared to the original versions), but whether one should be inserting them into your body is subject to opinion.
[0] https://www.forksoverknives.com/how-tos/plant-based-primer-b...
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/impossible-and-beyond-ho...
But they are still plant-based and do not contain any animal products.
I eat a vegan diet for one single reason and that is to avoid voting with my wallet for the continuation of factory farming. I do not care about any other parts of the vegan philosophy and/or lifestyle.
Those items are plant-based products and do not claim anything else. I do agree that they are not part of a healthy plant-based diet but that is a different topic altogether.
Without resorting to an anecdote, my point is that it might simply be easier to accidentally eat healthier food when one has to abide by the contents of the packaging.
and most of the positive associations observed for meat consumption and health risks were substantially attenuated after adjustment for body mass index (BMI).
I didnt read all the details, but that seems like a sneaky way to invalidate the benefits of eating meat. If sounds like the benefits correlate with low BMI, so they want to dismiss them. But what if eating meat helps one to maintain a low BMI? Suddenly the picture is cloudy.
As for heart disease, there is always the iodine rabbit experiment from the 1930s.
Just wanted to throw out there how healthy my vegetarian dinner was.
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.
If you are a homeless drug addict, being a vegan or vegetarian won't help improving your overall health. Likewise, being a well-off employed young individual in a stable and happy relationship who does regular health-checkups is more than enough to counter the daily 250g rare steak...
i.e. you can still be 'skinny as a rake' and be type-2 diabetic.
That surprised me. The article later gives a hypothesis that plentiful iron is good for pathogens, citing a separate and interesting article:
What did they eat, meat rarely (they couldn't afford it all the time), mostly vegetables (mostly home grown), salad-stuff, beans, maybe fruit and the odd nut.
Maybe going back to this direction, is the way we should be leaning.
Said "scientific study" is funded by Wellcome. An arm of WHO, unelected crisis manufacturer supreme. On wellcome's site:
"Reducing meat intake, particularly in the USA where meat consumption is highest, should be a global priority."
Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.
I couldn't find anything here about meat consumption:
You may already realize this but if you type
site:wellcome.org "Reducing meat intake, particularly in the USA where meat consumption is highest, should be a global priority."
into Google you'll find it.
And cancer research. But you didn't bring that up.
edit: Also not "An arm of WHO", they partner with them cause priorities (public health) are aligned.
A proper -mediocracy- meritocracy (i.e. it's actual skills and qualification that counts) is preferable over any kind of popularity contest. That's not to say the WHO in particular works by this standard, I just find it very irritating if people insist on every position or institution - especially very specialised ones - being subject to elections.
That just doesn't make sense and can have horrifying consequences (see [1] for an example). There are positions (in my example: medical examiners), that simply cannot be adequately filled by laypeople and amateurs. That's not how a complex society works. It's not the middle ages anymore and most professions and many official positions require training, experience, and qualifications.
That's why I don't get the obsession with everyone needing to be "elected" (and by that I assume you mean by the general public, because WHO positions in particular are in fact awarded by elections).
While I think mediocracy is more accurate, I think you meant "meritocracy".
Not sure about other parts of the world, though.
If you know how to cook, you can tell what it is, just by looking at it.
Is a filet mignon, ground beef, or chick thighs processed? Sure. But i don't think that is what we're talking about here.
It's not just chickens, I've seen ground meat, and pork tenderloins in supermarkets with the same processed treatment.
But like you said, it's the additives that we really think of as "processed". If you home make sausage with just ground meat and pork casing is that "processed" if you didnt add nitrates or edta? Technically yes, but that's where I think clear cut definitions need to be in place.
Lower risk of IDA (Iron deficiency anaemia), but you have a higher risk with the above five