Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
There's nuance in all of this. People sympathetic to American consumption patterns will probably see science and explanations like this as some kind of endorsement of their diet. Nutritional science is still in its infancy and we'll be waffling on the specifics for decades to come, especially if food companies have a vested interest in funding studies.
Another data point. Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake. I think people are too hyper focused on the "super" and "evil" quality of foods and we end up stuck in the margins bike-shedding the minutia.
I like to eat red meat two or three times a month: tasty and I think some red meat is healthy for me.
I avoid any packaged food except I am too lazy to always make homemade bread. +1 for shopping for fresh vegetables, fruits, berries, whole grains, beans,…
Really, the main center parts of grocery stores where everything is in plastic or boxes really needs to be avoided.
As a substitute for packaged deserts, making a pancake and berries is pretty good.
They add celery powder instead of nitrates, so they can claim "nitrate free". However, the celery powder just decomposes into nitrates, achieving the same effect
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-uncured-ba...
We buy our pork belly direct from a farm and it hasn't been touched with anything.
Just the "uncured" but still processed bacon that is pretty much just regular bacon
And even diary is hard to consume after seeing cows from a bio farm getting herded for milking. They’re in serious pain while getting continuously impregnated to maximise milk production… it’s really hard to stomach for me as I’m not morally opposed to milk/meat consumption… but the way these creatures are treated really make it hard.
I remember a YouTube of a journalist looking for the most humane technique to administer capital punishment and it turned out that during co2 asphyxia the victim goes light-headed, even laughingly before passing out and away without even realizing. When told about this, Death Sentence advocates were disappointed that the victims wouldn't suffer while the sentence was carried out. (surprising eh!)
The prices reflect this, of course, and I think the economics of more people adjusting their household budgets to eat in an affordable but also environmentally-sustainable way is really pivotal to seeing major change on this front in the future. They also claim to be carbon negative which is really interesting: https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/carbon-negative-grass.... https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019....
The cool thing is that a lot of these operations partner with butchers who can cut to order, so you get exactly the thickness of steaks you like, certain roasts, Korean-style ribs if you want them, soup bones, shanks, etc. all exactly how you like them.
Grass-fed beef is a superfood!
There's one other source of good meat: hunting. I suck at that but I have friends and associates who hunt and they are often trying to get rid of extra meat. Always happy to help with that :)
But short of moving to the midwest and making friends with your neighboring farmers, I don't know what to tell you.
A good portion of the meat I consume comes off my own land, mostly as venison although a little bit of turkey too. It tastes better than farmed meat, it's cheaper, it helps keep the animals from overpopulating, and the animal didn't live a miserable life of torture before it was harvested.
But I get that not everybody lives in an area where that is practical.
Cabbage, for instance, keeps longer than lettuce. Pluots keep, too, much better than peaches. Oranges, tangerines, and grapes keep well. Carrots keep pretty much forever.
In places where the grocery shops are within walking distance and more integrated with your life, you just make groceries more frequently. Consequently, the food you buy is always fresher.
There's so many things linked to poorer outcomes when associated with car dominate design
Fresh vegetables can stay good too if you buy the right kinds. I've found that asian leafy green vegetables like yu choy or gai lan keep a lot better. The leaves may turn a little yellow but they don't end up a slimy mess in a day. Cabbage is the western equivalent that keeps forever.
The beauty of canned goods is that you don't expend energy to store them.
The beauty of frozen veggies (and some frozen fruits, blueberries for example) is that they keep and work well for small quantities. I ate a lot of frozen veggies when I was single.
I recently had a pile of potatoes sitting around for reasons unclear, now I've got several portions of an amazing potato chowder sitting in the freezer, ready to nuke in minutes when I want them. I had a spare onion and carrot lying around so those went in too, worked out great, no planning or recipe required aside from keeping basic cooking staples on hand.
Alternatively most raw vegetables (and fruits!) can be pickled. While you do have to get the proportions roughly correct, making refrigerator pickles is as simple as throwing extra sliced veggies into a jar with water, vinegar and salt (herbs and spices optional to your preference). The acidity keeps them from going bad.
Fruits can be turned into freezer preserves almost as easily. Almost any combination you have lying around can be mashed and cooked down on the stove as much or as little as you want with some sugar, pectin is optional. They'll last for months in the freezer, weeks in the fridge.
People think I'm a cooking genius when they see all this random stuff in my fridge but it's all so easy, the truth is I just don't like waste.
My wife came home with a small bag of brussel sprouts and some "gourmet" Baklava that weighed a bit less, but not much. Virtually the same price.
It is very common for (cardboard tasting) tomatoes, which come from a high-production plant, to cost as much or even more than meat, that comes from a plant-consuming animal and then butchered and constantly refrigerated. the vegetable/meat price ratio in the US means vegetables are comparatively 3-5x+ more expensive than any of the many other places I have lived. They are more like 10x less expensive than meat in in some places I have lived. The same goes for nuts to carbs, etc. And you will feel it immediately in lack of energy and hunger if you don't have protein and the sufficient number of daily calories, while lack of vegetables mainly leads to a more subtle lack of general health.
I can go to Whole Foods and pay $10 for a bag of mini-cucumbers. Or I can go to Aldi and pay $3 for the same product picked from the same field and delivered regionally on the same train.
The answer people have to that is “I’m too busy and don’t have time to do that”. Grocery stores collect a lot of market intelligence and price to the audience. That’s why a tomato with a wholesale price of $0.50 costs more than a nice steak. Or why they sell pre-chopped carrots and onions to helpless people with money but without skill for $15/lb.
Fresh vegetables have a lot of handling, refrigeration and shipping timeline requirements that add a lot to the cost.
I suppose our food production has generally centralized over time to the regions that can grow these vegetables all year, and almost no vegetables are grown locally. So we end up paying the transportation costs, even during the four weeks in the fall when we could be overwhelmed by cheap locally-grown vegetables.
My ability to get broccoli in November in North Dakota is quite remarkable?
Oh, it is remarkable, but this is an honest question, do you really care?
I mean, I could get fresh tomatoes year round, but they're garbage outside of summer. When we buy things in season, they tend to be cheaper and taste better. Right now in my area, apples are plentiful and cheap! I really wish my supermarket would do some curation of products and only put the best stuff out for sale. I honestly don't care that I wouldn't be able to buy any (expensive, bland) fresh tomatoes right now. That's why we have cans...
The government really could focus on subsidizing healthier food options and stop subsidizing taco bell's crunch wrap things, pizza hut's stuffed crust pizza or various colas.
In season fruits and vegetables are inexpensive. You can easily find vegetables that are under $2/pound. Eating half a pound of vegetables a day (most people dont) is a dollar a day.
carrots are typically $1/pound, green peppers $2/pound, cabbage .67/pound, peas .35/pound, green beans $2/pound, broccoli 2/pound
beef is expensive, but chicken and sometimes pork are less expensive.
But that's where things are cheap and convenient! :(
UK supermarkets sell one cob cut into two halves, wrapped in plastic for $2
Ha, so do I, except if you started forcing me to give in to certain things bread would be one of the last I'd be willing to give up. (Unless I was allowed 'packaged' bread from an actual baker I suppose.)
Pre-sliced supermarket bread has to be me the most miserable yet widespread thing in existence, can't stand the stuff any more.
However, after some experimentation, I have discovered that it is possible to make bread in a simplified way, which does not need more than 10 minutes of effective work for one bread made of 500 g of wheat floor (including washing the vessels etc.).
I bake the bread in a microwave oven, in a lid-covered glass vessel. The right baking time must be determined by experiments, in my oven it is 13 minutes @ 1000 W for the dough made of 500 g of floor.
The advantage of the microwave oven is a short baking time and perfect reproducibility. After kneading the dough in a glass bowl for a few minutes, I can put it in the oven and go to do other activities. Now I make at home one bread every day after I wake up, for breakfast.
When baked at microwaves, you can use a leavening agent for a more conventional bread, but even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste.
Previously I was tempted from time to time to buy some commercial bread or cakes, but now I no longer care about them, I like more my own bread.
The simplest bread can be made with nothing else than wheat floor and water, by using the same method as described by Cato the Elder, 2200 years ago (except for using microwaves instead of fire).
With the wheat floor that I use (12.1% proteins), I add water that is 75% of the floor mass, e.g. 375 g water for 500 g floor.
The dough is kneaded for a few minutes, until it becomes homogeneous and elastic.
After kneading, it is possible to bake it immediately. However, in most days I prefer to make a bread with high protein content, in order to not exceed the daily intake of energy that would make me gain weight. For this option, the dough must be left to rest for 30 minutes, to become cohesive, than it can be washed for a few minutes, to remove a large part of the starch, enriching thus the dough in gluten, i.e. protein.
I bake the dough in a glass vessel covered by a lid, 13 minutes @ 1000 W in a microwave oven. The exact time will depend on the oven, so it must be determined by experiments. When the baking time is too long, the bread will harden.
Pure bread must be eaten immediately after cooling. Unlike the commercial bread with additives, it has poor shelf life.
Starting from the simplest bread, there are many options. One is to add a leavening agent, for a softer bread. Now, I prefer the unleavened bread, because when baked in a microwave oven it still grows, maybe 30% of what it might grow with an leavening agent, but it remains more chewy than standard bread. Unless you have untreated teeth problems, this is a good thing, because it causes much more satiety than soft bread in the same quantity. Chewing also keeps your teeth or your dental implants healthy, by stressing the bones.
Some people like to add salt to the bread, so that is another option (when that is done, one should take care that the recommended daily intake of salt is 4 to 5 g, so less salt should be added to other food). Various spices or seeds can also be added before baking.
Another option is to make it sweet, by adding sugar or raisins. Instead of mixing the sugar uniformly in the dough, I prefer to deposit the sugar on the flat dough, before baking, and then roll the dough and bend the resulting cylinder into a torus when transferring into the baking vessel. This method allows the use of less sugar, while still producing an intense enough sweet sensation, due to the alternation of sweetened and unsweetened layers in the baked bread. In this way, I use 50 g sugar for dough made of 500 g floor, but that should be adjusted depending on the individual taste. On the sugar, before rolling, I deposit e.g. cocoa powder (e.g. 5 g for 50 g sugar), vanilla essence, ground cinnamon, ground cloves etc. The advantage of this kind of simplified cake vs. traditional cakes or commercial cakes, besides the very short time for preparation, which allows doing this before breakfast, every day, is that the chewy bread, optionally with high-protein content, can cause satiety after ingesting a much smaller amount than would be needed when eating traditional cakes.
Could you provide some examples?
For example, let's say we remove cattle from the rolling, rocky hills of Quebec. We let the land go fallow, back to nature.
Ok, now endless deer, bison, moose, groundhogs, and endless other critters do a horrible thing. They eat, and they fart.
When people complain about meat, and carbon, they are complaining about the worst part of it.
Much of the world does not dump fertilizer on land, grow crop, and feed it to cattle.
It is very unfair to lump this all together, especially in a thread about people taking extreme positions.
Does the remaining 1% matter all that much in the conversation?
I struggle with the concept of feedlot farming being morally acceptable at all. However, I've been on a number of beef farms in the UK and it's just not representative of how British beef is raised.
> Much of the world does not dump fertilizer on land, grow crop, and feed it to cattle.
What's the percentage of grass fed vs grain? From a shallow search it seems like it's low single digits yet I see this argument come up a lot. Do you have different numbers perhaps?
Plot twist: the average US/EU diet can't be sustained on free range only meat/animal products.
In the US grass fed beef represent 4% of beef sold, and that's with a very loose definition of "grass fed"
Animal Cruelty, Domestic Violence, and Social Disorganization in a Suburban Setting - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2018.14...
As line speeds increase, meatpacking workers are in ever more danger - https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/line-speeds-increase-mea...
How safe are the workers who process our food? - https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/how-safe-are-the-w...
Killing for a Living: Psychological and Physiological Effects of Alienation of Food Production on Slaughterhouse Workers - https://core.ac.uk/outputs/54847380
The Slaughterhouse, Social Disorganization, and Violent Crime in Rural Communities - https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/23/6/article-p594_4.xml
American Slaughterhouses and the Need for Speed: An Examination of the Meatpacking-Methamphetamine Hypothesis - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602661769703...
Additionally, Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, which is largely attributed with launching public pressure to create federal reforms for more sanitary meat packing, originally created this to highlight how it fucked up the workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
Like for most environmental issues it all boils down to 8 billion human beings and counting on this planet.
In Western countries population is already naturally dropping. What's needed first and foremost is a culture shift so that we stop seeing that as a negative. In any case, we have no choice because population cannot keep growing indefinitely in a finite space (which is what would lead to an actual dystopian outcome and we are getting there just looking at the state of the environment).
The very fact that you replied what you replied just now after I mentioned population levels shows how the public has been conditioned.
And other countries than the US are operating on differnet margins.
Environmental impact (both carbon and water), animal cruelty/welfare in factory farms, high cost of more sustainable/lower cruelty options, general distaste for most of it
I personally cannot consume meat from mass production anymore with a good conscience after hearing pigs scream in pain as their cage entered into the CO2 cloud used to kill them. The CO2 forms acid when coming into contact with their eyes, nose, lungs and mouths. You can kinda get a tiny hint of that feeling when you drink too much carbonated soda and burp up CO2 throw your nose by accident.
I hope it doesn't sound patronizing but that's MY reason to avoid meat, even more so than the terrible environmental impact. If you have ever spent time with pigs on a farm, they are eerily similar to dogs in some ways, so intelligent and funny. We would never subject dogs to the crazy amount of torture and violence just to eat them for 5 minutes out of no necessity at all and I believe it takes cognitive dissonance and plain ignorance to then just torture pigs for years and then kill them. Most of them never get to see the sun or run across a field of grass in the spring. Just death, disease, oozing wounds and death by acid-suffocation.
It's not really about health. In this day and age you can be healthy with or without consuming animal products.
It's really about cruelty towards sentient beings and is the biosphere destruction really worth having a strip of bacon or a steak?
Are culinary pleasures more important than not inflicting all this cruelty and damage?
Pigs pass the mirror test and can be compared to small 2-3 year children when it comes to intelligence.
Cows are such gentle and curious animals.
And yet we treat animals as inanimate objects.
As Carl Sagan said 'They are too much like us'
If we ever achieve a Star Trek like society - those future humans will look back at this time the same way we look back at the times when slavery was fully accepted by society.
This one did it for me.
I have no problem with eating meat in principle, but it's hard/expensive to find ethically raised/killed meat
* Animal products require an inordinate amount of water to produce compared to plant-based products.
* Animal breeding and grazing at scale creates a bunch of environmental issues.
- Methane production
- Dust bowl effect due to over-grazing
- Manure runoff and associated effects
- Crazy abuse and proliferation of antibiotics and the resulting antibiotic resistant bacteria
* Fish, due to other human-origin environmental issues, are loaded with methyl-mercury and arsenic. This trend is only getting worse.
* Animals have brains and the associated emotion, pain and fear responses to trauma.
* Outside of chickens, most animals we like to eat are higher order mammals that are arguably more susceptible to the kinds of pain and distress we feel ourselves.
* Animal rights standards for slaughterhouses, especially in the US, are abysmal.
* Food and food handling standards for meat, especially in the US, are abysmal.
* Meat production creates a lot of secondary waste products that wouldn't be market competitive if they weren't subsidized by super-high meat production. Used as fillers in all kinds of things from pet food to cosmetics.
- eg. Animal tallow, gelatin, organ meat, animal bone-meal
- some of these are inherently useful, but as meat consumption rises to meet demand, so do these byproducts' supply and they show up all over as they now compete with vegetable based options.
* Nutritional benefits exist, but there are nutritional issues with red meat, organ meat and associated fats as well.
* A lot of food "certifications" are industry-managed and opaque to consumers, pushing a lot of negative externalities under the rug and making these things worse, not better.
- "Grass-fed" is a "best-effort" thing and most companies that claim this are still only seasonally feeding their animals grass while also supplementing with diets molasses.
- Free-range, prairie raised, farm-fresh, cage-free... What this means depends largely on who you ask.
- etc. etc.
Just given the above, animal foods aren't required for adequate human sustenance and yet there are a lot of issues with them.
There are of course nutritional benefits to consuming meat and negative externalities from modern agricultural practices, but I think animal production has high costs for its benefits.
It doesn't have to be an all or nothing either. Everyone reducing their meat consumption by a little has an outsized impact compared to some zealots doing so. No one benefits if we treat this as some kind of morality food fight or religious crusade.
"Street food" sounds awesome until you realize that you have no idea where the meat you're eating came from, how it was raised, handled, prepared. It is cheap for a reason. It could have easily been the stuff you saw by the side of the road sitting out in the sun with flies all over it. Ever been to a wet market?
I was once in a super remote town in northern Vietnam staying at a small hotel. They were having a festival of some sort and someone had left a 300+ lbs pig in the parking lot sitting there in the sun. Alive, barely. It was so abused, it could barely lift its head. That was going to be the delight of the festival.
How do you even know the meat is the meat they say it is? I've seen my share of dog/cat restaurants. Other than those being generally more expensive... who knows... maybe they ran out of pig that day (swine flu was in full effect when I was there).
Certainly, veggies also have their share of issues... sprayed with who knows what sorts of chemicals smuggled in from China... grown next to polluted rivers... in polluted air.
Now, back in the US, we have it so good here...
Fully agree with your take except for "eat [...] as often as possible" part. For instance, intermittent fasting is effective exactly because of not eating often.
The mechanism of diets isn’t understood yet - check out Kevin Hall’s metabolic ward study of low fat high carb vs. high fat low carb for some paradoxical results.
I’d be happy finding a diet that consistently works for people before understanding how.
I did a few searches. Turns out there are benefits to food processing. Inactivation of toxins seems like a big plus to me. Improved nutrition, seems good.
Yes, many processed foods are of nutritionally poor value, but please don't label all processed food as being bad.
According to this Mayo Clinic quotation of USDA, processed food includes anything dried, frozen, canned, or mixed. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...
I don't think (and am guessing most would agree) canned tomatoes are particularly harmful food, nor are frozen blueberries or fish, nor are dried raisins when I'm putting them in oats.
It's a spectrum. With my kids, dried mangoes make me slightly guilty because I know they are pretty high in sugar, albeit natural sugar. Most people would be more wary of frozen chicken nuggets. Some more specificity around what makes processed foods harmful, from the science and science comms communities, would be helpful.
Canned sardines/mackerel is super healthy and minimally processed. Just like canned beans, canned tomatoes, canned corn..etc
The word “processed” is kind of a lazy heuristic - butchering, cooking, hulling, mixing, those are all ways of processing that are healthy and effective.
Creating something like a Twinkie is a whole different ballgame and looks more like a triumph of chemical engineering and material science than anything related to baking or cooking.
Perhaps there are ultra-processed foods that are not unhealthy, but that does not include "Impossible Meat".
Many of us have switched to things other than meat, but that choice seems beyond most people.
Another alternative is what is called "lab-grown meat", which is not a meat substitute, per se, but is actual meat that might be a lot less harmful to produce. Where it sits on the "processed" spectrum is hard to assess. Obviously it is, in one sense, 100% processed, but details matter.
Some bread made from acorn flower, cooked butchered meat or hulled rice would be fine, but giving them a Twinkie or Mountain Dew seems like the kind of thing that might lose them their job.
If I process cabbage into Sauerkraut or Kimchi, does that count as bad, because it's "processed"? What if it's processed by some company? What if they process it differently?
Case in point, Sauerkraut. If I make that at home, the bacteria stay alive the whole time. They still multiply in my fridge right now and keep the Sauerkraut OK to eat if a bit mushy after being left in there for too long coz I don't eat it often enough. If I buy Sauerkraut in a glass it's dead. Sure, they also used bacteria to actually make the Sauerkraut. And then they killed off all of the good bacteria by pasteurization to be able to stick it on a shelf w/ a long best before date and to guarantee the texture and color. Not to mention the extra "ingredients" they put in there.
So Kimchi is considered minimally processed. Flour has various processing levels to make bread. Enriched white is strictly worse than others.
Cookies with hydrogenated palm oil would be bad. Any oils beyond cold pressed extra virgin olive oil are supposedly bad.
Now the preservatives in store bought kimchi could theoretically be a bigger issue.. I don't know how many folks have studied them. I imagine they just pass through us but probably influence the microbiome etc...
Canned foods are worse than fresh or frozen.
1. Something that was originally nutritious, but had some part removed due to processing. Sometimes they attempt to add vitamins back into it, like enriched flour, but the issue is that we don’t know what else might be missing, or how changing the structure affects the body (faster absorbing carbs for example)
2. Foods that are sanitized heavily. Obviously it’s in the name of safety, but there could be benefits to eating a little dirt sometimes (ie there’s tons of vitamin B12 in dirt, but who knows what else we could be missing)
3. Foods that have lots of artificial or derived chemicals. Many are probably fine but it’s hard to know how certain things affect our gut microbiome.
There’s so much we still don’t understand about our bodies, especially our gut and it’s bacteria. That’s why nutrition science changes constantly. “Fat is bad, no wait it’s good” etc.
It’s not entirely scientific, but I strongly recommend reading In Defense Of Food. It’s thought-provoking and hits heavily on the many inconsistencies in our primitive understanding of nutrition. The author also calls out interesting points about “whole unprocessed foods” and why nutrition science is hard (eg too many variables)
Do you think this is some sort of a smart or incisive observation?
I am sorry if I come off as rude, but I have grown weary of people making such asinine comments, quibbling about terms and their definitions, when they clearly know what the parent comment is talking about.
And there's a case in point right in one the answers to my reply:
So Kimchi is considered minimally processed
As with the Sauerkraut example, home made Kimchi is minimally processed I would agree. Commercial Kimchi, like commercial Sauerkraut I would probably count as just "processed", not good for you. But agileAlligator may not see even commercial Kimchi/Sauerkraut as processed and he draws the line at "processed cheese", so that weird vegetable oil with "natural" color in it.
agileAlligator says
Asking what the definition of processed food is, is talking past the point.
- cheese, pickled herring, charcuterie and such which can be part of a healthy diet
- pre-made (supermarket) meals or junk food (a vulgar term but unfortunately fitting) which typically aren't part of a healthy diet
To be glib, any process that makes normally undigestible things edible to humans would qualify for that. Cooked rice is superior to raw rice, fermented cabbage is superior to raw cabbage, and glazed onions are superior to raw onions.
That's usually not the type of processing people refer to when they use the term "processed foods". It usually refers to a type of processing where the original ingredients are no longer individually recognizable, and where the end result contains much more additives (sugar, salt, fats) than were in the original product(s).
When you see “natural”, “processed” or “toxin” in reference to a food, health or cosmetic product, pretend the word isn’t there. At best, it means nothing, at worst it is a manipulation designed to part your money from you or a fake cure.
Perdue sells raw, butchered chicken breasts by the pound with 5% water as “minimally processed”, for example.
I think most people understand it to mean something more like "stuffed full of oil or sugar".
https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/what-is-nixtamal-arti...
Thank you!
The term 'hyper-processed' is used to refer to foods that bare very little resemblance to recognizable ingredients straight from the farm.
If you highly diversify your diet, if any one thing is 'bad' for you, you are by your actions, reducing your exposure to it.
As far as processed foods, there are different forms of 'processing'. For example, canned vegetables are pretty minimally processed. Cured sausages are more highly processed, and nacho cheese doritos are really highly processed.
Nature has a way of limiting how much of a certain substance you can consume. By simply eating less processed foods, you’re eating more in line with what the human body expects historically.
Take oils for example. It requires immense pressure and processing, only available in the Industrial Age, to produce the quantitates of certain oils. We consume way more oil than ever expected. Sugar is in the same boat. Ground wheat is kinda too…
The more processing the worse it is for you, as a general rule of thumb. So yea, eat Whole Foods when you can!
Is your belief that "Nature" is an actor which can (intentionally or unintentionally) limit human consumption? Or are you saying something more like: "there's a physical limit to how much air a human can breathe in a day"?
Wheat too was in our diets long ago with the first recorded use in 32,000 BCE. Sugar was 8,000 BCE.
The problem with articles like this is that it’s designed to be an echo chamber of denialism.
The key to being healthy is good diet. Good diet means good ingredients. Most animals are treated like crap and fed crap too—save for a few small-scale producers.
If you want to eat meat do yourself (and everyone having to hear these discussions) a favor: visit a high quality Kobe cattle ranch and see how they treat the animals.
Then visit a large-scale farm (tip: you might need top-secret clearance) which provides the majority of beef products to the USA.
Compare the difference…
Garbage in = garbage out.
Not sure about other nutrients.
> We evaluated the relationship between unprocessed red meat consumption and six selected disease outcomes following implementation of a meta-analytic approach. We found that unprocessed red meat intake had weak evidence of an association with increased risk of colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes and no evidence of an association with ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke. In other words, given all the data available on red meat intake and risk of a subsequent outcome, we estimate that consuming unprocessed red meat across an average range of exposure levels increases the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes at least slightly compared to eating no red meat (by at least 6%, 3%, 1% and 1%, respectively).
[0] Full text here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z#Sec2
"We found weak evidence of ..." becomes "New study ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS the myth that..."
I see this claim semi frequently online. So I'll just ask.
What is meant by "processed"? What does it mean to be "worse" (Worse than meat? Regular foods?) What is meant by "whole foods"? And finally, what's the evidence for these assertions?
Is black tea a processed food? How about coffee grounds? When does something cross the rubric of processed vs unprocessed?
To me, it's not obvious that "processed is bad" particularly because I don't know what "processed" means.
As a side, how do fortified foods fit in with processed foods? Iodine in salt, for example, has been a huge public health success. Goiters have practically been eliminated as a result.
Even if I accept that "Processed foods are more or less the only remaining food-based explanation." My questions really boil down to "what are processed foods" and "What's the evidence they are bad"?
The study includes an appendix with photos of all the meals - it's very interesting!
The evidence suggests that various qualities of ultra-processed foods drive overconsumption. There is also speculation that the calories in ultra-processed foods are more bioavailable than those in less processed foods because ultra-processed foods are easier to digest due to their low fiber content, though I don't have any evidence for than on hand (will update if I find it).
Definitely send more studies if you find them. This one seems to suggest the main problem with ultraprocessed foods is they are easier to over eat (they taste better? Are less filling?) but it doesn't really show that they are necessarily bad.
Seems to jive with how food works for me. I've been counting calories as of late and it's definitely easy to down a bag of doritos or drink a bottle of soda
Have you heard of Stephan Guyenet? His book The Hungry Brain is a good read on the neuroscience of obesity. He proposes that eating highly palatable calorie-dense foods changes the brain in various ways that ultimately drive us to consume more of those foods and to have difficulty changing our eating behavior. Unfortunately his suggestion is to eat an intentionally bland diet, which is obviously unappealing, but my anecdotal experience is that highly palatable but less processed foods (e.g. a wheel of brie) are far more satiating than similar but ultra-processed foods (e.g. queso made from velveeta).
I'm not sold on the idea that we need to eat bland foods, or only foods familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, or only plant products...it seems to me that we only need to go back 50 years or so to before the dramatic rise in obesity started, which points toward avoiding ultra-processed foods. I hope we get more studies on this eventually!
Note that I'm not saying we should do this - I believe obesity is much more likely caused by a wide array of lifestyle factors that no study to date accurately controls for (including diet, exercise, stress, environmental factors, mental status, medication etc), not a single dietary style.
Now, "processed foods" is indeed a very vague term, and people tend to include/exclude different foods based on their pet theory of what may lead to the link "observed" in the previous paragraph.
For example, some people strongly believe that glycemic spikes are strongly coupled with diabetes and obesity, and they would include things like fruit juices (as opposed to eating whole fruits) into this category, as well as high glycemic index foods such as bread (in both cases, even home-made ones).
Other people believe that certain additives are likely to have undocumented side-effects, so they will tend to only include foods with synthetic additives, such as preservatives and food colouring, but exclude traditional highly processed foods such as bread or butter as long as they are home-made without additives.
Yet other groups believe the correlation is related to palatability and/or satiety, so they will consider processed foods to be any foods which contain high ratios of palatable substances (like fat, sugar, salt, MSG, other flavour enhancers) to less palatable macro-nutrients. These people would probably include home-made fruit juice or ramen into the processed foods category, but may exclude things like pickles.
If it's unreasonable to pin down what is processed, it seems unreasonable to make a claim about the effects of processing.
Our understanding of nutrition and health isn't keeping up in pace with innovations in the food industry. And due to the scale and depth of it I think it's unavoidable that many small bad things will sum up over time leading to health problems without a clear root cause.
Reasons why "processed" food might be bad for health:
- skewed omega-3/omega-6 ratio
- micro-nutrients depletion
Also it's just not economical or environmentally sustainable to feed everyone with "real food". At least not without radical change and trade-offs in other areas.
> Processed meat – meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation
> Red meat – unprocessed mammalian muscle meat such as beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton, horse and goat meat
> Consumption of processed meat was classified as carcinogenic and red meat as probably carcinogenic after the IARC Working Group – comprised of 22 scientists from ten countries – evaluated over 800 studies. Conclusions were primarily based on the evidence for colorectal cancer. Data also showed positive associations between processed meat consumption and stomach cancer, and between red meat consumption and pancreatic and prostate cancer.
When they talk about causing cancer they're talking about two things: the quality of the evidence, and then the strength of the effect.
For processed red meat the evidence is very strong: processed red meat does cause colorectal cancer.
But how much cancer does it cause? It doesn't appear to cause much cancer. If you have a genetic predisposition to colorectal cancer, or if you want to be very cautious, you might want to think about avoiding processed red meat. But otherwise, well, the small increase in risk might be worth it for the benefits you get from eating food you enjoy.
When people use the term "processed foods" colloquially they are generally referring to NOVA group 4, ultra-processed foods. It seems that that group is implicated in worse health outcomes and it is also that group that has proliferated the most significantly over the past 40 years in tandem with rising rates of obesity and poor health outcomes.
The term is quiet loose.
And I'd agree, that category does generally seem to be an issue. Though, I have to wonder if it's more a problem that that category typically has foods with an absurd amount of calories that are easy to consume.
For instance, pure peanut butter is unprocessed. While it runs through a mechanism to change it from peanuts to peanut butter, there is no oil added, nor are any of the healthful nutrients of peanut butter extracted. Opposite to this is peanut butter like JIF which is processed - the mix is diluted with sugar and vegetable oil to make the same amount of food for cheaper.
Same with tofu - it starts as soybeans and is ran through a mechanism to turn it into the blocks of tofu we see in stores, but we do not add sugar or oils to change the contents of that block, nor do we remove nutrients from the soybean (this may not be 100% accurate, but generally speaking, nutrients are not removed in this). However, many vegan meat products put a lot of unhealthy additions into the mix, thus making it processed.
In the case of meat I think it's usually referring to added nitrates as a result of processing, which is linked to health problems [0].
> To me, it's not obvious that "processed is bad" particularly because I don't know what "processed" means.
Yeah I think your point is valid - "whole" is a bit like "natural". Too broad and undefined. We're supposed to think one is good and one is bad because marketing of "whole" and "natural" is trying to create that impression. No-one says "chemical" in their marketing, like no-one says "processed". You only advertise as "natural" or "whole".
[0] WebMD, but there's loads of articles about it https://www.webmd.com/diet/foods-high-in-nitrates
I think the closest you can get to a "real" definition is food that has added ingredients, usually oils or preservatives, not found in traditional cooking. Usually these are added more for reasons of shelf-life or in order to cram in extra taste, or both.
But this is very, very weak evidence.
edit: of course I have to assume something about the structure of the data to say it's very weak evidence. It may be very strong evidence of a very weak effect.
-----
edit 2: Also, how is this, the last "takeaway," listed in bold, large font directly beneath the headline, some sort of exaggeration or mischaracterization?
> They only found weak evidence that unprocessed red meat consumption is linked to colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease, and no link at all between eating red meat and stroke.
Right, because the results of the previous studies amount to evidence that is too weak to conclude that red meat is inherently unhealthy to consume. I'm not sure how your comment contradicts this.
> The available evidence suggests that eating no unprocessed red meat may minimize the risk of disease incidence and mortality compared to consuming any, but there is insufficient evidence to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations. More rigorous, well-powered research is needed to better understand and quantify the relationship between unprocessed red meat intake and chronic disease.
Breakfast for me is eggs, avo, toast, some light veggies (spinach, other leafy stuff). Tasty, probably alright for me.
I'm not good at the diversify part though . . . I tend to eat this every day :)
Your breakfast sounds tasty. I don't blame you for having it often. :+1:
I do recognize I probably don't know nearly enough.
For one thing I don't think most people would even agree on what foods count as processed and are bad. Some people are talking about everything except fresh vegetables, some people are talking about specifically industrially-processed food but would say the exact same recipe followed at home (minus a couple of preservatives) is perfectly fine, some people are specifically against fast food but might think canned foods are fine.
Large blood sugar spikes after a meal are what is bad for you, but this a more nuanced equation of things like glycemic load of the food (which is as much a factor of quantity eaten as it is glycemic index), genetics, and level of exercise. It's not as simple as just saying all processed food is always bad, for instance after a hard workout simple carbohydrates are not just ok but actively good for you, and ideally most people should be doing a hard workout multiple times per week. Some other components of processed food like excessive salt can be bad, as is the fact that they often push out more micronutrient-rich foods from your diet.
But it kind of strikes me as the abstinence-only approach to dietary advice. People love the taste of processed foods, I think we'd do better to encourage eating responsibly overall than insisting on avoiding processed foods altogether. And it's possible to be very healthy while eating a significant amount of processed foods.
If I grill a steak and then chop it up into pieces i have "processed" it. This isn't what anyone is talking about when they say processed foods though.
If I chop up several different types of meat, add several different colorants, fillers, perservatives and whatever else, turn it all into a slurry and then reconsistute it into a spam loaf, I think there are a lot of good reasons to believe this is ineherently unhealthy, the most simple being that its really easy to dump in a bunch of sugar and extra fats.
> Group 1 - Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat, milk, etc.) Group 2 - Foods processed in the kitchen with the aim of extending their shelf life. In practice, these are ingredients to be used in the kitchen such as fats, aromatic herbs, etc. to be kept in jars or in the refrigerator to be able to use them later. Group 3 - Processed foods. These are the foods obtained by combining foods of groups 1 and 2 to obtain the many food products for domestic use (bread, jams, etc.) made up of a few ingredients Group 4 - Ultra-processed foods. They are the ones that use many ingredients including food additives that improve palatability, processed raw materials (hydrogenated fats, modified starches, etc.) and ingredients that are rarely used in home cooking such as soy protein or mechanically separated meat. These foods are mainly of industrial origin and are characterized by a good pleasantness and the fact that they can be stored for a long time.
And processed foods aren't in isolation. You're mixing up all sorts of stuff which can viably result in chemical and other changes which will vary by product, producer, and even time. Trying to pin all of that down is not really possible.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartrazine#Potential_health_ef...
Generally speaking, industrially-processed foods are going to be overall less healthy than less-processed alternatives. There are a multitude of reasons this may be so, and between them there's enormous variance in both the size of and our confidence in those effects, not to mention between specific products.
Being overly specific just invites pointless quibbling over those details. Of course, not being specific just started this pointless quibble, so damned if you do damned if you don't.
If the problem is the food coloring, then we need to go out and say so. If the problem is the high fat content, we shouldn't pretend that home cooking with lots of oils (which oils?) isn't any healthier than processed food. Is the spoon of sugar I add to my home-made stir-fry sauce the problem, or is it the fact that I am frying it, or the fact that I serve it next to a plate full of rice?
I don't view there to be a burden of proof that I should eat something unless someone can present data that that specific thing is unhealthy
I can use inference to decide there is a reasonable probability that something is unhealthy without some arbitrary burden of specific proof
In this case, the link between processed foods (Nova groups 3 and especially 4) seems strong enough to warrant minimizing them in my diet even though the evidence for the specific ingredients or mechanisms is weaker.
The example I was given was eating raw sweetcorn. Infamously, you can be sure a certain amount will pass through you undigested.
If you grind it up first and make bread out of the flour you will absorb far more.
Secondly breaking things down robs them of flavour and texture.
To compensate manufacturers add a load of now easily absorbed salt, sugar and fat.
None of that is good depending on what your goals are.
Interesting. I am curious what your definition of "responsible eating" is?
Some people might find that they have a hard time not over-eating with processed foods, and maybe for them their preferred diet is just to avoid all processed foods. But it's useful to treat that as a means to an end, rather than saying that avoiding processed foods always needs to be the end goal.
The conventional wisdom says you should have variety in your diet, but it's unclear to me why that's "good" and I've never seen research on it.
There isn't much point to this comment other than the flabbergasting anecdote of how eating roughly the same diet in different countries can have markedly different effect in your health.
https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-pa...
Because of corn subsidies the nation is awash in cheap corn. This is turned into "HFCS" and put everywhere.
Google "surprising sources of hidden sugar" - you might be surprised to find foods that you are not expecting sugar are buried with it in the US.
I think this is really the most important thing anyone can do. Not directed at you at all or at anything you said, but I dislike the term "vegetarian" in general. It suggests a binary diet: either you eat meat, or you don't. Someone who never eats meat and someone who eats meat once a month have essentially the same diet. It makes little sense to distinguish one as vegetarian and one as not. The pervasive idea that you could eat no meat for years and that somehow taking a bit of meat makes you "not vegetarian" anymore is kind of ridiculous. I won't get into it but the concept of "sobriety" often falls into the same trap.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with choosing to not eat any meat products (or not drink any alcohol), it's got nothing to do with the choices people make for themselves, simply how we discuss it.
I think the terms "vegetarian" and "vegan" are only useful as descriptors of food: whether it contains meat or any animal products at all. But categorizing people as "vegetarian" or "vegan" is absurd and counter-productive.
Or are you trying to say that bread is somehow unhealthy? Even though it is staple eaten by literally everyone across the world in someway, shape or form.
Terms like this destroy the credibility of "food research" and I find it hard to trust any dietary guidance. Specially after the whole fat & sugar debacle
Not all bread is made the same. Not all bread ingredients are the same. Those individual ingredients can be processed as well. The more processing on the ingredients and end product, the more "processed" a food is. I'm not even touching "highly processed" or "ultra-processed" foods in this short post.
I have to conclude that it's being upvoted here because people enjoy eating red meat and want to continue to do so, not because it has any particular merit on its own terms.
This discussion today is already off to a great start with bro science and bragging about personal choices that are clearly the best, with the occasional 'but I am a little weak, so I don't get it perfect every time' tossed in to make it sound real. Hell, there's even a bit of the smug international 'this is just an America problem' already cropping up. Another day ending in Y on HN.
What you're describing is more confirmation bias than virtue signaling. Certainly there's plenty of both here.
Could you clarify whether this is sarcasm or not, so I can decide?
When better science comes around, then we can let the MSM get away with making these claims.
What better term is there? It wasn't pseudoscience, because the studies were real, and addressed scientific topics. It wasn't scientific fraud, because again the studies were real. But the implications 'derived' from them by motivated media were completely made up. My dictionary calls that 'bullshit'.
Also see:
In an area where there are huge amounts of lobbyist dollars arguing in the same direction, I'd love more technical reasons about why every other study is flawed and why this burden-of-proof function is meaningful.
I'm not realistically going to read the 25 page PDF in a field I'm not in.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The health risks of eating unprocessed red meat may have been overstated, but there is still some evidence that has to be considered. And the article itself says that while the evidence of danger from meat consumption may be a proxy for correlated lifestyle changes so this narrow finding doesn't actually negate policy. Pushing people to eat whole grains, fruits and vegetables still stands as the best option.
I’ve heard of the ag lobby and the meat and dairy lobbies but never big grain. Of course they exist and do something but going against the meat lobby just seems weird.
-- About 50% of US corn production goes toward animal feed (and another 30% goes to ethanol). Slightly out of date source, but recent figures show this has only moved a few percentage points. [1]
-- Over 70% of US soybean production goes toward animal feed. [2]
-- I wasn't able to find something similar about wheat, but I would guess nearly all of it is human consumption.
Given this, it's safe to say that a large portion of these grain subsidies are linked to meat, although to get a better idea of the distribution, we would need to see a further breakdown by category (corn, soybeans, wheat).
[1] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten... [2] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...
They’re deeply tied to the meat industry so would benefit more from increased consumption.
When it skews towards your preconceived notions you hardly notice it. It's important to be aware of the voice behind the article
Similarly, "wine/coffee/beer/marijuana/chocolate/etc is good for you" type studies tend to be upvoted because people like evidence that helps rationalize their habits and vices.
This is my life and the only way to live it is to lie to some people in a certain way. So we're going to have this mutually beneficial world where we have to modify the narrative so all parties can get what they want.
Specifically, the study it leans on most concludes:
> We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke. We also found that while risk for the six outcomes in our analysis combined was minimized at 0 g unprocessed red meat intake per day, the 95% uncertainty interval that incorporated between-study heterogeneity was very wide: from 0–200 g d−1. While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations. More rigorous, well-powered research is needed to better understand and quantify the relationship between consumption of unprocessed red meat and chronic disease. [0]
This conclusion is dramatically different from "not a health risk."
[0] https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...
It has been multiyear battles to get their "official scientific consensus) moved off things like "eggs are bad" and now finally "meat is bad". Glad to see there's progress being made. Also glad I got out of that field.
Anyways, I'm not complaining about it being hard or complicated, I'm complaining about it being low quality and corrupt. For instance: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
One thing about engineering is it can succeed or fail fairly quickly, and the results can mostly be replicated. We build a reactor and we soon know whether it works or not. And reactors are something we understand enough that we can design them, and create them.
Meanwhile in nutrition we're making educated guesses and watching what happens over decades. What helps one person kills another. We're using statistics to tease out the truth, to get mere glimpses of the truth. We're on the outside making educated guesses about a system beyond our full comprehension.
A final thought: Which will happen first: commercially viable fusion energy, or the obesity rate in the US falling below 25%? Which would you bet on? (I am considering the challenge of how to improve the diet and nutrition of an entire nation under the umbrella of "nutrition science" here.)
As other have noted in the comments, research into nutrition is often poorly distributed and implemented. It often over emphasizes child nutrition and neglects adult nutrition. And it is fraught with bad science and agendas.
This says nothing about how complex nutrition is compared to any other field of research.
If they acknowledged the complexity, there wouldn't have been a "Food Pyramid".
My wife is in the process of transferring her international nutrition degree to the US, and we learned that starting in Jan 2024, nutritionists will now need a Masters degree to be eligible for accreditation.
Talk about pulling up the drawbridge behind you...
> We also found that while risk for the six outcomes in our analysis combined was minimized at 0 g unprocessed red meat intake per day, the 95% uncertainty interval that incorporated between-study heterogeneity was very wide: from 0–200 g d−1. While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations.
Doesn't sound like it particularly slams years of shoddy research.
The author has a different purpose in publishing as evidenced in the well crafted headline, as correlated with ratio of commenters here engaging on that headline w/o reading the abstract.
Is this not a slam?
So you're saying there's a chance...
> "Here, we propose a complementary approach, in which we quantify the mean relationship (the risk function) between risk exposure and a disease or injury outcome, after adjusting for known biases in the existing studies. Unlike existing approaches, our approach does not force log-linearity in risk functions or make additional approximations, such as midpoint approximations for ranges or shared reference group"
1. MANY studies over many years show red meat consumption is bad 2. This study shows that it's bad, but not a lot 3. This is ONE study we're talking about 4. This study invents a new statistical methodology
This "one study" is a meta-analysis, which considers many studies.
Furthermore, meta-analysis methodology is very important. Doing it wrong is bad. Working to make it better is good.
They did that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01968-z
Furthermore, the study does not separate growth-hormone-treated and antibiotic-treated meat, which is widely considered to have higher health risks.
Similarly, there's no mention of food-borne illnesses due to microbial contamination, again a higher risk in combined and processed meat (hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage etc.)
> "Approximately 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3000 die each year from foodborne illness. A ten-year study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 46% of these hospitalizations and 43% of the deaths to meat. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the primary federal agency tasked with regulating food, is aware of these statistics, and characterizes them as “largely preventable.” It is becoming clear that modern meat production methods allow pathogens to spread with ease, creating great food safety risks."
If FDA Does Not Regulate Food, Who Will? A Study of Hormones and Antibiotics in Meat Production (2015)
https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/0098858815591528
A single animal, raised on crops not contaminated with pesticides and herbicides, nor treated with antibiotics and growth hormones, and butchered in a food-safe manner with due regard for avoiding microbial contamination, is not a health risk.
This rules out, what, >95% of domestic USA meat production, at least?
> "Approximately 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3000 die each year from foodborne illness. A ten-year study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 54% of these hospitalizations and 57% of the deaths to vegetables. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the primary federal agency tasked with regulating food, is aware of these statistics, and characterizes them as “largely preventable.” It is becoming clear that modern vegetable production methods allow pathogens to spread with ease, creating great food safety risks."
> "These percentages do not include illnesses and deaths caused by seafood. See John A. Painter et al., Attribution of Foodborne Illnesses, Hospitalizations, and Deaths to Food Commodities by Using Outbreak Data, United States, 1998-2008"
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/19/3/11-1866_article
Hospitalizations:
> "An estimated 26,000 (46%) annual hospitalizations were attributed to land animal commodities, 24,000 (41%) to plant commodities, and 3,000 (6%) to aquatic animal commodities (Table 2). Produce commodities accounted for 38% of hospitalizations and meat-poultry commodities for 22%. Dairy accounted for the most hospitalizations (16%), followed by leafy vegetables (14%), poultry (12%), and vine-stalk vegetables (10%) (Figure 2, panel B). Among the estimated 57,000 hospitalizations, 8% were not attributed to a pathogen, mainly because the dataset did not include data for Toxoplasma spp.
Deaths:
> An estimated 629 (43%) deaths each year were attributed to land animal, 363 (25%) to plant, and 94 (6%) to aquatic commodities (Table 3). Meat-poultry commodities accounted for 29% of deaths and produce 23%. Among the 17 commodities, poultry accounted for the most deaths (19%), followed by dairy (10%), vine-stalk vegetables (7%), fruits-nuts (6%), and leafy vegetables (6%) (Figure 2, panel C). Of the 278 deaths attributed to poultry, most were attributed to Listeria monocytogenes (63%) or Salmonella spp. (26%). Among the 1,451 estimated deaths, 25% were not attributed to a pathogen, mainly because the dataset did not include data for Toxoplasma spp."
The real conclusion here is that the food supply chain in the USA is poorly regulated and presents large health risks to consumers, and as the producers do not have to bear the costs of externalities (air and water pollution, increased disease, etc.) they are under no pressure to improve the situation.
Again, meat, like vegetables, fruits, grains, leafy produce, etc. - when produced under high standards (i.e. no pesticide/herbicide contamination, no hormones and antibiotics, no violations of food safety standards) is quite healthy to consume.
reading the headline I had zero expectation that this applied to processed meat
Have you read your own data?
>study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 46% of these hospitalizations and 43% of the deaths to meat
The majority of foodborne illnesses do not come from meat. If you are observant, you would notice that a disproportionate amount of things like E.coli outbreaks are associated to salads served in fast foods. And much of the risk associated with meat comes from a lack of hygiene or under-cooked meat. Chicken is a high risk of E.coli when under-cooked but it's much less dangerous than a damn lettuce when it's well done.
Regardless of ingredients (meat or pure vegetarian) there's also too many illnesses contracted because employees of restaurants are severely lacking in hygiene. Gastroenteritis causing pathogens should have ceased to exist if people were not so disgusting, going to the toilet without washing their hands.
But ignoring that, the article is further confirmation that you should eat more vegetables and less processed meat, like your doctors have been telling you. But with some extra attacks on expertise and science, which I'm sure will be helpful in further eroding our civilization.
My Dad is 101 and doing OK, and he has always preferred large salads, small amounts of lean meat. I feel better whenever I hit the Fuhrman Diet for six months.
use olive for almost everything, but it’s not the best choice for high(er) temp so I go for the sunflower oil.
Both of them are easy to make at home and last for months in the fridge or at room temperature.
I do like cooking with it despite the low heat limitation because it's good for things you can cook at lower temps like eggs and if you get good high quality oil then it will be near tasteless. Which means you can actually taste the egg instead of whatever oil / lard you fried them with.
I’ve read though that the whole fear of over-heated olive oil is overblown, so who knows. Like everything in nutritional science it is unclear.
My wife likes occasional fried food and coconut oil works fine for that.
Could someone elaborate as to what the issue is with seed oils?
“How Its Made - Canola Oil”
This was all I needed to see to know I don’t want to consume it ever again.
https://youtu.be/9Qk2LEN6opQ?t=1826
tldr, yes seed oils go through a lot of processing but human outcome data dosent seem to indicate that they cause any negative health effects
e.g. foods that are doped with additives that don't necessarily occur in the food's base state, including dyes, preservatives, added flavors generated in lab environments, etc.
To be fair I'm not advocating either way, since I'm sure I ate some form of ultra-processed food this morning just by having grocery store brand jelly on my toast, but I think the argument is that by mixing these into the diet frequently there are unknown long-term side effects on the human body by eating these in excess.
> If you currently eat more than 90g (cooked weight) of red or processed meat a day, the Department of Health and Social Care advises that you cut down to 70g.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/meat-nutrit...
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-guidelines-and-fo...
Pork, veal, venison etc. = red meat.
I assume that "unprocessed" meat refers to meat that is cooked at home, as opposed to buying sausages, ham or any other industrial meat products, which may contain various additives or impurities from techniques like smoking.
This new study still shows an increased probability of cancer when consuming more than 200 g of unprocessed red meat per day, which is indeed more than should normally be eaten.
I have always been skeptical about these claims about the effects of eating meat, because they do not differentiate between the different methods of cooking the meat. I doubt that eating meat that was fried in oil has the same health effects as eating meat that was baked in an oven.
https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrit...
For me, processed meat means rubbery hotdog sausages; reconstituted chicken meat; doner kebab; TV dinners; fishcakes, and so on. [Edit: ham and bacon, of course, but only a crazy person eats a quarter-pound of bacon.] I imagine some of those are fine, but if you can't see the unprocessed ingredient, then the 'Lemon Market' rule says it's probably not what it's supposed to be.
The cancer claims haven't been specifically against things like hot dogs, sausages, pepperoni sticks, etc., but red meat. When the term "red meat" is used, that's implying anything containing red-looking meat from large ruminant animals.
> plus the one specific risk category
That's because that's the only risk category that anyone thought was credible up to this point. There are no risk categories for red meat, besides perhaps that one can overeat protein. That's really hard to do, especially with red meat.
> But ignoring that, the article is further confirmation that you should eat more vegetables and less processed meat,
There is no sound scientific evidence that anyone should eat more vegetables. People are certainly free to eat vegetables, they can be pretty tasty, and some may come with their own individual benefits, but there's nothing inherent to vegetables as a category that means we should simply consume more of them. Vegetables have their own drawbacks and contain various substances that are contraindicated in humans. Vegetables may be better than processed foods on a case by case basis, but not as a group. Humans aren't specialized in consuming them as a primary source of nutrition.
> like your doctors have been telling you
"Your doctors" know f--- all about nutrition. General practitioners are not nutritionists and are not trained in nutrition. Their job is to prescribe pills or send you to a specialist.
Pigs are not ruminants. Their meat is usually considered red meat.
But another reason is simply your individual health profile. Most people know that the Inuit and other northern people's have adaptations to allow them to handle much higher levels of meat and fat. Maybe you can't handle as much as other people can.
I only read the abstract but I saw nothing about the risk of obesity and diabetes there, but clearly in rich countries, we eat too much meat.
Lastly there is the environmental reasons. We can't feed everyone the same amount of meat that we in the rich countries eat. So sooner or later we will have to get used to less.
When I was getting my Nutrition degree, I was involved in building a community website to help single fathers learn to cook for their kids. When we applied for the funding, we were one of three applications in the adult education section, versus hundreds in the child education category.
What do you think are the reasons most education efforts are spent on children? It seems to mirror the fact that children spend a significant part of their time on education, while adult education is ad-hoc and self-directed. Are there other factors that you can see from inside the field?
Buy good cookbooks. Bring your own food to things. That basically sums up our success sticking with it.
Health-wise, my health markers are extremely good. No B12 or iron deficiency. I attribute a ton of this success to consistent physical activity, though, particularly weight lifting.
Regarding physical activity, it comes easy, I am in way better physical health than the bay majority of my peers, if not for my asthma issues. I associate that, again, not with the diet, but with general physical activity.
Basically, the diet doesn't hurt, and statistically isn't likely to help you. The important part is the ecological cost of a diet full of meat, imo, or if someone eats enormous amounts of meat and ends up with a physical malady from it.
> red meat consumption is linked to colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease
I'm only a little deceptive here, because the study only found "weak" evidence of the above, so they did find some evidence.
So the study produced some evidence that aligns with previous research and somehow this "slams" previous research?
The study tries to account for things like publication bias (though seems to not find any evidence for it or do any accounting for it in 5/6 of the comparisons under study). I don't think it's wise to conclude from the fringe cutting through the x-axis that only shoddy research would claim unprocessed red meat has a health risk (which is to say nothing about processed red meat, the subject of most of the headline-grabbing studies about health risks).
You're right, but they don't claim that. The y-axis here is "relative risk." There's no such thing as "no risk" in these studies.
Practically speaking, of course, there is -- most of us live our lives with "low risk" = "no risk," necessarily.
The takeaway from this figure is exactly what's written in the article: "As shown in Fig. 4, the relationship between unprocessed red meat intake and combined-cause incidence and mortality was increasing across the entire exposure domain."
That's from the study that I didn't criticize, not the bigthink article that I do criticize. The claims about "shoddy research" and "not a health risk" are from the bigthink article, not the study. If bigthink rewrote the article to focus on the quotation you provided, it would be far more informative.
Edit: And to somewhat address your point about relative risk (RR). If someone told me that an activity had almost no upside health risk, and a wide range of downside health risk, I would not think "no health risk" is an appropriate summary statement. Again, this is a criticism of the bigthink (or really, RealClearScience) article.
I've checked my cholesterol levels and they are low, despite me being a fan of butter and red meat. If they ever became a problem I would cut out the saturated fats, but there seems to be little point in doing that preemptively.
It's as if we know exactly zero information about the relationship between food and health, because for every fact, there'll be another contradictory fact.
I have no trust in food related scientific research. Give us properly conducted experiments with large enough (millions?) sample sizes and all the necessary blinds, publish it, and ensure we can STICK with it, don't leave openings for papers with the opposite opinion to be published, by making your experiment good enough to be indisputable. Thank you.
With all due respect, this comment sounds like you've not really ever considered how this research is actually conducted.
I will not claim that nutrition science has achieved methodological purity, because obviously that is far from the truth. But the system doesn't seem to be as broken as folks think.
I think the field just has a long way to go before it settles on methods that are reproducible. Until then, opposing papers are literally the only path we have to get there.
Or they use animal models, animals whose natural diet looks nothing like a human diet.
The only way to really know how diet affects health is to take a large group of people, assign them different diets, see that they actually follow them, then measure the outcomes. But practically nobody does this because it is really expensive to do.
I'm not in a position to critique the methodology. But the reports that reach the public (and what use are reports that don't reach the public?) keep contradicting one another. If they can't get consistent results, then these reports shouldn't be appearing on the front pages of newspapers; they should stay in the pages of obscure journals.
I pay no attention at all to "nutrition science". I eat a mixed diet, no fruit at all, few green vegetables, a small steak once a week or so, quite a lot of cheese and whole grains. I let my stomach guide me. If I followed dietary guidelines, I'd probably starve. I simply can't swallow food that doesn't appeal to my appetite.
Part of your frustration is that you're asking the wrong question. "Is it good or bad?" That is the too simple of a question.
Let me use an example we can all understand on Hacker New: Is React good or bad? Should I start using React? We all know, it depends. Asking whether something is good or bad is not helpful.
The human body is more complicated than even the worst software project. And we're dealing with millions of bodies, all different, not just one. What is healthy for one person will kill another person (allergies, etc). Going back to React, we seem to want the answer to be either "everyone should use React", or "nobody should use React"; we want a clear answer that applies to everyone, but that's impossible.
I found this YouTube video almost exactly answers your question, context and all: https://youtu.be/mQ56uOkjccg
"Before <Grandma> starts making breakfast, can someone check the news and see if we're allowed to eat eggs this week?"
Said the other way, getting to the individual level will have a massive impact on how we approach health and medicine.
Am I too optimistic? If and when we can get to this individual level, are we each still a very complex system with too many unknown unknowns - too many interdependencies and unknown relationships between cause and effect (even when they do exist)?
People desperately want diet to behave like classical physics with an indentikit formula they can just roll out to everyone but it's just not the case. Everyone's body responds to different foods differently and even reacts to those same foods differently over time or in different situations. The only real way to find out is personal experimentation and observation.
And we are the most evolved species in this damn mud ball. I'm sick of it. From religions, cultures and science, everybody has something to say about the food we eat. But my body? Nope, almost nothing or too late, and that point you don't even know what caused the damage.
I see a cow and it just eats the grass all day. It is stronger than me. It weigh more than me. It might be less intellectual than me, but it is not less intelligent than me as far as nutrition science.
My impression is that this is not really a problem with the research itself. There's the well-known problem of science journalists turning every finding into vastly simplified and often flat wrong clickbait. But there is a separate issue with recommendation bodies being very conservative and slow to change a recommendation. In all the time I've been paying attention, which is years now, every published finding about risks from red meat has pretty much exclusively been from processed and charred meats, with the risk clearly coming from nitrates and carbon, not from the meat itself.
I don't personally "like" this finding. I live in Texas, love brisket, got seriously into smoking meats for years in my 30s, but there is no way I can look at all the evidence that's come out and conclude anything other than that eating smoked meat on a regular basis for decades is going to increase risk. But at the same time, I have nothing to make me believe that simply eating red meat at all that has not been smoked or charred and otherwise modified in some way to extend shelf life, is going to increase risk. And the studies themselves never claimed this. It's health agencies and science journalism that chose to make this interpretation without it being justified, whether out of an abundance of caution or just to grab eyeballs.
My stats knowledge is admittedly shallow, but this seemed a bit out of place to me. Is it common to develop novel statistical vehicles for meta-studies like this? My expectation would be that this is a kind of investigation we've been doing for a while, so new models aren't really needed.
I have cut out beef easily. There are a whole host of other reasons to not eat beef or minimize it in your diet. But I'd be curious who funded this research directly or indirectly.
> ...given all the data available on red meat intake and risk of a subsequent outcome, we estimate that consuming unprocessed red meat across an average range of exposure levels increases the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes at least slightly compared to eating no red meat (by at least 6%, 3%, 1% and 1%, respectively). Furthermore, the conservative interpretation of available data is consistent with no association between consuming unprocessed red meat and the risk of subsequent ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke
In other words, very mild risk of _unprocessed_ red meat consumption.
Here's the thing - the culprit isn't the meat itself, it's the saturated fat within the meat. Fatty meats have more saturated fat, and the dose-response of red meat (which is generally higher fat than other meats) means it takes very little to hit general recommendations for saturated fat consumption (less than 10% of total calories).
Also it's hard to decipher what "processing" really is. Ground meat is processed. Bacon is really processed. But you have to cut up meat from an animal to make it packageable - this is all processing. What is "bad" processing of meat? What is "good"? Is there such a thing? Does the moment you cure the meat (i.e. bacon) make it "bad"?
This is how the general public is left with more questions than answers when research like this comes out. But if you stick to the canonical advice of eat lots of plants and a little bit of animal products, you're probably going to be okay. Keep saturated fat and sodium in check. Keep your fiber high. Don't smoke and don't drink to excess. Manage stress. Exercise. All that stuff in aggregate is what matters far more than a grass fed ribeye for dinner tonight.
He’s an Outspoken Defender of Meat. Industry Funds His Research, Files Show.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-...
It’s like comparing the space/time complexity of different programs without looking at the code - and instead only looking at the language it was written in.
Can you still do that though ?
Animal farming evolved a looot since then
And so, the researchers came up with the burden of proof risk function, a novel statistical method to quantitatively “evaluate and summarize evidence of risk across different risk-outcome pairs.” Using the function, any researcher can evaluate published data for a certain health risk, then, using the function, compute a single number that translates to a one- through five-star rating system.
Outside of that, the entire tenor of the article sounds like it's out of an EA journal. We don't do "studies" -- we do _real_ studies.
ok.
...site funded by Kochs. ouch.
Water consumption, land use, and biodiversity loss are way more important than even our own health care. On top of that, market pressure will always enable abusive treatment and processing of the animal, which is what large-scale animal husbandry inherently is anyway, while climate change and the size of the global population perpetually accelerate the rise of the costs of and competition for our resources.
But even today it’s obvious that’s simply untrue. Less fats and proteins, more grains? Way to go, food pyramid.
I’m not equipped to scrutinize this report on red meat. But I do know that they can be very very wrong and to be skeptical of any bold claim in any direction.
Grain fed animals have very high saturated fat amount compared to grass fed ones.
Grass fed animals and wild boars and wild cattle have much more PUFAs than grain fed ones.
So the quality of meat went down drasticaly in the last 100 years.
Which is ironic since many carnivores are screaming "PUFA bad" in a reductionist fashion and at the same time say you "must eat only grass fed animals" lol.
PUFA: Polyunsaturated fatty acids are fatty acids that contain more than one double bond in their backbone
By "carnivores" I mean people who only eat meat: they are all taking the stance that "saturated fat good, PUFA bad".
It seems ‘an intuition’ to what processed is to most people; some things are obvious ($1 per 12 freezer pack of burgers are not going to be unprocessed), but it gets less obvious fast…
Personally I consider a can of skipjack tuna in spring water to be unprocessed, even though it has been canned.
I consider a frozen bag of peeled and cooked shrimp to be unprocessed, even though it has been peeled, cooked, and frozen.
But a frozen bag of peeled garlic shrimp I would consider to be processed, because the ingredient list contains items I don't exactly know what they are.
So that's my definition, it's the ingredient list.
Isn't a calorie just a calorie though? Or is this in regards to what comes alongside those calories?
Energy-wise, yes, but the devil is in the details. If I had to infer the meaning here it's that high protein = constipation = not good. Vegetable calories include fiber which is important to insure you're processing things efficiently. Additionally, good vegetables (unfortunately not the ones you can get at the store usually) contain lots of great vitamins and minerals. I would be curious if they mean a typical American chain store vegetable which demonstrably has almost no nutrition compared to it's natural counterpart.
They determined that the science doesn't really support claims of red meat causing x, y or z health issue. That is not the same as finding that red meat is not a health risk.
The real conclusion: Nutrition science has a long history of poor methodology and cannot state much at all with much statistical confidence.
That conclusion should not shock anyone familiar with how most such studies get done.
"Low fat diets are heart-healthy" was false, "high salt causes high blood pressure" was false, and now this "red meat causes cancer" is false. The same goes for "blue light causes sleep disruption" was shoddy science as well, conducted on 8 people with an average difference of 15 mins. Yet Apple and other phone manufacturers modified their settings because of this bad science that made its way through our society.
There was a time when people who disputed low fat diets by pointing to the Mediterrean Diet, and they were considered heretics.
This is why free flow of scientific information is vital to a well functioning society. Without it, we tend to fall into groupthink and we never advance our thinking. MY ENTIRE LIFE, I've been inundated with the idea that red meat caused cancer, especially burnt red meat, and at first I was scared, and then I started eschewing it, and I was right. I'm glad these scientists had the courage to go against the "accepted" view and every scientist should have the freedom to do the same without being castigated. That's one of the biggest problem we have in society today.
What you eat is what it eats.
maybe butchers
The pushback is against potentially finding negative impacts of one part of a category and labeling the whole category based off that one example.
Your stomach digests it. That is essentially what a lab grown meat is, a bunch of cancer cells.
But not terribly relevant for humans.
Grains and sugar have been the biggest lie I was ever told.
But here's what I propose to you HN reader: take 30 days. 30 measly days, eat eggs, meat and dairy. No grain, no processed shit. Give it a try and see how you feel. Ignore the rest.
Remember that how you feel isn't the same thing as your long term health risks. My belief, and that of mainstream science, is that this diet will raise your cholesterol and increase your risk of heart disease. You won't be able to feel your heart health worsening until things are very bad. It might be a trade-off some people want though.
I also believe that what works for one might not work for another. So yes, trying different things and getting measurements is good advice. I'd warn against chiropractors (they call themselves "doctors", but not of medicine) on YouTube telling people that cholesterol doesn't matter; it is a risk factor, but only one of many factors.
My understanding is that they've done a wide variety of studies continuously over decades.
They observed only, people with higher cholesterol were more likely to die.
They fed various animals high fat diets, the animals died sooner than control groups. The animals who are a lot of fat had higher serum cholesterol.
They tried diet interventions, no medicine, just getting people to eat different, those who ate less saturated fat tended to live longer. Saturated fat is correlated with cholesterol levels, as shown in other observational studies.
They created medicines, did trials, some of the medicines tended to lower cholesterol and extend life, others lowered cholesterol and didn't extend life.
It's complicated, but there's a wide variety of studies that have looked at cholesterol from different angles and taken all together paint a crude but coherent picture.
Today, we know that total cholesterol is quite crude, looking at LDL is better, and there's other blood markers that are even better than LDL.
It's complex and beyond what can be discussed effectively on HN, but there's a lot behind the conventional wisdom on cholesterol. Dismissing it all as "bunk science" is dismissing a strawman.
Furthermore, mainstream recommendations are completely reasonable. Eat a variety of food, avoid processed foods, limit saturated fat but some is ok, only give statins when cholesterol is very high or their risk for heart disease is high. If more people followed the guidelines, the net effect would mostly be people eating more whole fruits and vegetables, hardly the great evil the industry is sometimes accused of.
10 days to evaluate a diet seem low. Not many people in the history of humanity have had a pure carnivore diet, there's a reason we have evolved longer intestines than carnivores. Another interesting fact is that the inuk people who have mostly a carnivore diet due to inability to farm in the artic, live 15 years shorter than the average person in the developed world. Omnivore is the way to go, not carnivore.
I expect the main two mechanisms of action are that these diets tend to reduce total caloric intake (lower variety = lower interest in eating; less opportunistic snacking since what's on offer is often not allowed by the diet; and so on) and drastically reduce how much outright crap adherents eat.