I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.
Forgive me if I fell for deadpan sarcasm... but you're joking, right?
Commercial organizations who make money from the sale of environment (natural resources, such as petrolium, animals, crops) have orders of magnitude more money to spend to fund research than organizations which seek to protect those resources.
This is ancient as the bible (the first murder, when the crop farmer murdered the animal farmer).
For example, one thing we now know, is that Coca-Cola (a crop-based company) bribed scientists to blame the obesity crisis on meat, and deflect it away from its own products.
So no, that person is not joking, animal rights activists are not fighting big-corpo only, they are ALSO helping big-corpo, they are just pawns in a chessboard that is too big for many of them realize they are pawns.
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.
But we're unlikely to see better scientific research because there's ethical problems around keeping people behind forcing people to eat specific foods and keeping them behind lock and key for observation, and so they don't eat a single gram of anything outside the boundaries of the study. Unless more of such research can be carried out, too much of what we do is uncontrolled to make meaningful observations about what's unhealthy and what's not.
What meat eating has that other diets don't have is not just the phenotype of our digestive systems (being like that of other meat eaters), or archaeological evidence of our ancestors using sharp tools and arrows, but stable isotope testing of fossil evidence linking our recent ancestors to a substantial amount of meat eating for around 4 million years. If you compare that to the amount of time we've had agriculture, ~30k years, the time in which we've been subsisting not only on more plants but plants selectively bred to be more nutritious than they were in the wild is a flash in the pan.
My opinion is that we should reconsider the ethics around researching nutrition, because it's been an overall failure, and has probably harmed more people than would scientific studies. This isn't to say that ethics in science should be abolished, but relying on the mouse model and epidemiology doesn't appear to be doing the most good.
How would that invalidate research showing, for example, a link between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat? That some behaviour produces a competitive advantage at one time does not mean it comes without risk, nor that newer behaviours aren't better in some or even all ways, nor that it would remain advantageous for all time.
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.
In the world where food is abundant and chronic disease caused by overconsumption of calorie dense foods is extremely prevalent, it’s worth re-examining meat as a staple food. This is not touching on our polluted world and meat’s role as bioamplifier of toxins in our foood chain, along with a bunch of other good reasons to re-examine our relationship to meat as a society
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.
And indeed, correlations aren't causation, but the claim is “The study said it had identified causal relationships between eating red meat and coronary heart disease, breast cancer and strokes, on top of links already established with diabetes and colon cancer” and the "serious errors" are that “the study had failed to take into account the nutritional benefits of red meat as a source of vitamins, iron and protein, that should be weighed against any risks”. I find that a misleading use of the word "error". Don't you?
That just isn’t true. Advances in nutritional science have had a major impact. Vitamin C made transatlantic shipping empires far more viable. The discovery of folate eliminated a whole class of birth defects. Fluoride improved the oral health of nations. The whole reason that nutritional science has any credulity today is that it had an unequivocal positive effect on mankind’s quality of life at barely any cost.
Goes both ways of course.
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.
But yes, with the data being in favor of humans being meat eaters, absent any potential health consequences from such a diet (not that I personally believe there are), the science should be far more rigorous. Actually, much of it isn't science, because epidemiology is not a science any more than "computer science."
In case, if anyone here this wants some reading material, or to consider that the case against meat is anything but clear:
Behavioral Characteristics and Self-Reported Health Status among 2029 Adults Consuming a “Carnivore Diet”
https://academic.oup.com/cdn/article/5/12/nzab133/6415894
^^ To be clear, I consider this kind of research as dubious as similar studies both refuting carnivory or supporting plant-based diets. What it does do is counter the idea that humans aren't supposed to eat meat on the same level as the evidence used to support that claim.
Why Humans Eat Meat
https://www.history.com/news/why-humans-eat-meat
For 2 Million Years, Humans Ate Meat And Little Else
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate...
Exceptionally high δ15N values in collagen single amino acids confirm Neandertals as high-trophic level carnivores
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6421459/
Stable isotope dietary analysis of the Tianyuan 1 early modern human
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706269/
Evolutionary basis for the human diet: consequences for human health
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733113/
Comparative Digestive Physiology
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.
It would be like publishing a paper that says walking upright is harmful and then people start crab walking. Like yes you can explain many back problems with walking upright, but does that actually justify a different form of walking?
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.
> That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.
You don’t need written records to determine the broad strokes of early human diets. That’s an archeological problem for biological anthropologist who in fact have determined that meat entered the human diet around the time our brains grew substantially in size. There’s also cave paintings showing hunting of large animals by early humans.
The very fact that humans universally (barring medical exception) even have the capacity to digest meat is already indicative of this.
> whatever was locally available until the last 100 years
Agriculture was not invented 100 years ago. This is off by at least 2 orders of magnitude. Cows and goats were also domesticated over a very long period of time.
Perhaps by “locally available” you meant “locally available by means of farming and herding because humans lived near those”?
I'm talking about the (low quality) quantities available to almost anyone almost anywhere in the world for a relatively low price. And from looking at developing economies, it seems increased consumption of meat is an intentional sign of increasing wealth.
As far as large scale domesticated animal production, that is a "relatively" new thing. Before modern transportation, there were many parts of the world where such meat was minimal or simply not available.
Crickets, grasshoppers, and many other insects have incredibly high protein/mass ratios and are readily available.
I have zero interest in consuming those forms, but I also 99% avoid any animal proteins. If a prime rib steak falls on my plate, however, I will not send it away!
But the agricultural revolution itself is probably one of man's greatest mistakes. It concentrated people, caused greatly increased population growth, ruined lands, created things to fight over, etc.
Pre-agriculture was likely a better natural global balance.
On the contrary, there is so much evidence of hominids, including humans, hunting and eating large game, that we name eras in prehistory after the tools constructed to aid this pursuit.
Indeed humans have probably always consumed some form of animal protein. But there's a lot more going on than just buying cheap ground beef from the supermarket as we can do now for very little cost.
That and your carrying the goalposts with you as you wander about makes this an unproductive conversation to continue.
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.