'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

Reproduction in science is a though problem -- not only it requires specialist lab equipment, methods or procedures, but sometimes "a trick" is needed. Inconveniently, it may not be mentioned in the publication for whatever reason. Therefore, giving an unexperienced PhD a task of reproducing somebody's work may end up to be a futile effort. But the idea is neat in general, I think.

Here an example of a typical project, where researchers are interested in the role of gene X in blood vessel formation in cancer, which could make it a good target for a cancer treatment. They want to knock the gene out and measure the blood vessel formation in an in vitro model.

Publication 1.

- We attempted to knock this gene out in this cell line, but due to an infection the cell line died. The installation was sterilized, the stored master cell bank was unfrozen, and we updated our sterilization protocols.

Publication 2.

- We attempted to knock this gene out in this cell line, but sequencing showed that there were off-target effects introduced. Reagents should be changed to be more specific.

Publication 3.

- The gene was succesfully knocked, but we found that a homologous gene appeared to activate the same pathway. The homologous gene should be knocked out as well to study the function of the gene.

Publication 4.

- The gene was successfully knocked out by disabling the gene and its homologue. The assay we used to study blood vessel formation was flawed. Due to insufficient oxygen supply, the positive and negative controls for blood vessel formation did not grow. New experiments should increase oxygen flow.

Publication 5.

- We successfully studied the function of the gene and found that it does not impact blood vessel formation in cell line x.

This is how the majority of research projects end up.

However, other researchers will be looking for a biological target to treat cancer X, and the information obtained by this series of experiments is not interesting. This is just one out of 99% of 30,000 genes that are not suitable treatment targets.

The conclusions are only interesting for researchers focused on gene x (and maybe its homologue), and potentially for researchers developing methodology. Questions answered were different than the original ones posed.

1. Include the ones that passed and discard those that failed. 2. Run the tests several times and report only the best result. 3. Keep some of the details secret (data, some weird parameters, or maybe the whole repository), tweak something, run again, get some nice figures and publish a new paper.

What a bold empirical claim. Could you share any evidence of this?

Medical research in particular seems to suffer a lot from papers where something has been measured with no supporting theory whatsoever and consequently no real information other than "If you do what we did you probably get the same result". Rather unsurprisingly this is hard to replicate because there's no theory telling you what is and isn't relevant to replicate.

I'm not saying this is easy to fix, but maybe we should focus more effort on papers that expand the theory, rather than papers that at best show that something might be the case but we don't know why.

After all they are serving to the advance of science also (and saving thousands of expensive hours of research to other). If you want to promote it, just create incentives.

Otherwise, If the cheater wins in a 95% of the times and the verifier does not have anything to gain (and will damage their own research by the time invested on this) after a while only cheaters remain [1]. At middle term, all research tend towards a sort of expensive shamanism in well illuminated white rooms.

[1] (And of course the non cheaters will be actively blocked from this point).

Are they? If your proposed project does not align with current politics, no funding for you.

[1] https://sentientmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/food-av...

I also dont really understand the full appeal as mono-cropping has devastated forests and animal species. And those harvesting machines kill many animals in the fields.

>In her initial correspondence with The Lancet, Stanton declared that she was a part-time employee of Devenish Nutrition, an agricultural-technology and animal-feed company in which she also holds shares.

>One of the co-authors of the open letter, Christopher Elliott, of Queen’s, declared grants to his research institute from Devenish.

This is ancient as the bible (the first murder, when the crop farmer murdered the animal farmer).

I don't know if anyone at Cargill has read the bible, but they are the largest ag company in the USA and raise livestock, food crops, and animal feed crops. They have over $100B in Global revenue each year.

When their common enemy is environmentalists, nature/animal welfare supporters (which includes those concerned with insect or soil life population), and human health experts (who raise issues with factory farmed meat effects on humans), the two forces you mention definitely do work together.

It is fair to say that crop corporations fight animal corporations less than they fight environmentalist/animal-welfare organizations.

We have only just now reached the point where the last group of anti-climate people have begun accepting that climate change is real. They've simply moved their argument to "it wasn't humans' fault". This is 100% because of the overwhelming influence of energy sector finances vs environmentalists.

The same goes on with food/animal topics.

Sure, the odd paper comes out showing that something bad is actually bad. But as HN talks about quite often, being a researcher is a difficult balance between producing research that pleases the financial backers and which is of real scientific value.

You are absolutely right about the cost-benefit balance in the case of cancer and red meat (or really in the consumption of anything). That's why it's important for people to understand our evolutionary past, even if it might seem peripheral to the cancer link itself. If we go into subjects like this with a flawed mindset, we'll get flawed results. If it was more commonly understood that meat isn't just tasty, non-nutritious, artery clogging filler food that greedy humans only recently started doing because slaughtering animals is fun, jumping to conclusions about red meat and cancer wouldn't be nearly as popular.

Like, it's plausible that the red meat is causing these cancers. It's also plausible to have a different cause - e.g. if people's lifestyles lead to a correlation between consumption of red meat and smoking (for the sake of argument - I have no idea if there actually is one) then we would observe a link between lung cancer and the consumption of red meat without there being any causal relation.

It's also quite plausible that certain ways of preparing food is causing these cancers (e.g. nitrates in bacon, and known carcinogens from high temperature frying on pan or open flame), and we're seeing the effect because we're currently often preparing red meat in this way, but replacing the red meat with fish or vegetarian equivalent in the same fried dish would still have the same carcinogens, and thus the intervention would not get the expected results.

So, a correlation between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat is a good probable cause for an investigation of the causal relationships, but I'd be wary of using it to argue for major dietary changes - the last decades had far too many counterproductive dietary recommendations (e.g. regarding cholesterol) because of non-causal evidence leading into wrong assumptions.

So if our diets largely involved meat for millions of years during as our time as hunters and gatherers, it's likely we have evolved to eat and digest meat quite well by now without it negatively impacting our health. We do know we have eaten meat for at least a million of years, as we are omnivores and have some carnivorous teeth. And we likely evolved to be omnivores because it probably helped some of our ancient ancestors survive periods of food (plant) scarcity. Some evolutionary researchers think meat eating may even be apart of how we were able to develop our human intelligence.

In the case of something as ancient as meat eating, which is so fundamental to our species as to be reflected in our very physiology (teeth, digestive system), this is an extremely high bar.

I somehow don't believe people ate meat in quantities we do today. Though yea people ate meat.

I can go to supermarket and eat red meat/chicken every day of the week - to hunt large animal it could take couple days. Of course there was more animals to be hunted but it is not like humans ate chicken breast all time.

They ate all kind of crappy meat, legs, tendons whatever they could eat. Best meat like steak or chicken breast was special occasion. People invented stew so they could have meat in multiple days so you eat a little bit of meat everyday.

Nowadays it is like special occasion every day.

That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.

This topic is "red" meat. That does not include fish, insects, and other non-red meats. The human diet was historically highly dependent upon whatever was locally available until the last 100 years (or less).

Also, the gut biomes of humans were historically very different than ours are today.

Now we have easy availability of lower quality meat (typical modern factory farmed meat which we consume larger quantities of), very different gut biomes, more sedentary lifestyles, and any number of other "new" things that make us abnormal humans in human history spectrum; so it's fair to believe that we could have some negative health effects from eating red meat.

Like yes you can explain many airway problems with smoking, but does that actually justify not smoking?

I hope that helps show that injecting such obvious bias into your examples introduces obvious weaknesses, too.

As long as science was done properly, the results are valid (even if the opinions on what those results mean may not be).

And if "not enough science was done" to rigorously investigate the entire landscape, that's not a failing of those doing the science. It's not their job to perform years-long work for nothing, so someone's going to have to pay for it, and academia has no money, independent research institutes only work on commission, and companies obviously only pay for studies they think will let them grow as a business. Especially in that last case, if the research does some funny stuff with the statistics (as is so often the case), that's on "us" (as in, the reviewers, publishers, and experts in the field) to call bullshit on, but "those who stand to gain pay for the research" has been driving research since before either of us was born.

Sorry, but this is inaccurate. A Keto diet is basically low carbohydrate and high fat. Protein is generally consumed in relatively moderate amounts on a successful Keto diet. The goal of the keto diet is basically to replace the bodies preferred energy source from using glucose to using fat. Excess protein can be used by the liver to create glycogen and inhibit the bodies ability to burn fat for energy. Excess protein will mean you never reach ketosis, which is the measurement used to determine if your body is burning fat for energy instead of carbs.

It’s a common mistake though, because everybody assumes it’s high protein.

The right composition of plants does matter great deal.