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Comment by sfeng | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't you also interpret these results as: meat is hard to digest and requires a lot of work on the part of the gastric system. When you don't eat it, the gastric system is able to down-regulate.

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No, you can't. Plant-based meat != meat. If you want to argue against meat, test with meat.

To put it more blunt: article is testing vegan/vegetarian junkfood. That says something about vegan/vegetarian junkfood. Not meat. Not unprocessed vegetables.

Haha right… my next question was going to be.. okay so our gut produces less XYZ…. Is that a bad thing? High consumptions of red meat is positively associated with all cause mortality - while high veggies diet is opposite.

> High consumptions of red meat is positively associated with all cause mortality

For who? Everyone?

All individuals are different but when discussing all cause mortality.. yes I think that is in reference to potentially everyone.

Until you can tell me what percent of people are “potentially everyone “you can’t say this diet helps any specific person. This idea of something being generally good for a population can cause illness to a substantial amount of people.

For the animals

correlation is not causation, unless you have an agenda

And yet when studies are done where people eat the same except for red meat the correlation disappears.

Here’s the thing eating red meat is normal, vegetarians are generally more concerned with their health and do a lot of other healthy things.

Do note I said "high consumption" - the studies are implying that the two groups are not eating the same and the difference is red meat.

I do not doubt that there is some level of red meat consumption that does not have a statistically significant impact on ACM.

That's what I'm thinking too. These are all digestive responses they're measuring: stuff the body does to get whatever it ate digested. Producing less of this stuff means, presumably, that less of it was needed.

This is like running a study on safety equipment and concluding that "Elbow Pads inhibit inflammation response in Skateboarders" (because they don't skin their elbows!).

Meh. I'll wait for more real science here. But this seems incredibly spun, especially given the researcher's employer identities.

Where is your scientific evidence That meat is hard to digest? What does it mean that it’s “hard to digest”? I mean vegetable fiber is totally undigestible and passes right through a system. So shouldn’t fiber being impossible to digest to be even worse than meat?

The protein and fat and meet may take longer to digest, but that doesn’t mean it’s “harder” to digest. Saying it is harder to digest implies that this is a problem. It’s not a problem, it’s just different.

Yes. And we also know that vegetarian people's digestive tract becomes longer after switching from a meat diet, and the reverse also happens if they go back to meat.

So there is definitely adaptation going on, and it's not at all necessarily pathological, but very likely beneficial.

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