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Comment by froggychairs | Hacker News Reader

We know red meat isn’t healthy. Most (not all) fake meats try to replicate red meat.

What proof do you have them being unhealthy? Impossible for example has fairly simple list of ingredients. Better macros than burger ground.

Anecdotally. My father in law has had to stop eating red meat due to health concerns. He enjoys impossible products just fine with no negative concerns in blood biomarkers or examines (several years running now). We are controlling for exercise patterns too. He’s just replaced his frequent burgers with an impossible patty instead.

This comment is just a wild claim with no evidence and falsely equates “processed” with “unhealthy”

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> We know red meat isn’t healthy.

I think you mean we have studies of dubious quality blaming red meat. And scores of people repeating the same trite arguments.

It's the same people that brought to you salt causes high blood pressure and saturated fat causes atherosclerosis, pushing the low fat craze and the obesity epidemic.

Sure, meat is bad, go eat hyper processed fake meat.

Thank you!

Those studies were all ideological driven and would never pass replication.

Mongols vs China, diet was a defining factor in the Mongols victories.

Meat and dairy, the dairy gave them tons go vitamin D as well.

> Mongols vs China, diet was a defining factor in the Mongols victories.

Source?

not the OP, but this was covered a fair bit in a book I read recently called "genghis khan and the making of the modern world" which was a pretty good read.

Iirc it was that the figting forces of the various northern chinese states were comprised of conscript peasants whose diet consisted of grain and not much else, which stunted their growth among other things, meaning the mongols were significantly larger and stronger than them leading to certain mythologizing in the centuries afterwards. It probably also didn't help that the conscripted peasants were, well, conscript foot soldiers, wheras the mongols were willing participants on horseback

Thanks!

Bang on, same thing with the Dutch and the Brits when the empire flourished.

Dietary changes drive a lot of these things, more than I think is generally understood and credited.

The Mongols are a very famous example and extreme as you stated the Chinese peasant and soliders mostly had a grain based diet and poor health that came with it.

Consuming a lot of heme iron is proven to be bad for the heart. Red meat contains heme iron in great amounts.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23708150/

Epidemiologic nutritional studies are proven to be totally useless. They literally are a questionnaire asking people what do they eat, take some health markers and drawing conclusions. I spent the morning reading through the data of that "plant-based diets reduce colorectal cancer" on the front-page of the Guardian [1], and it's yet another pile of cherry picked inconclusive crap people will keep sharing on social media.

From just 2 minutes with your paper: "Higher heme iron intake appeared to be significantly associated with a 31 % (95 % CI 4–67 %) elevated risk of developing CHD" --- lmao, loving that 95% confidence interval between 4 and 67%.

Passing those out as proof of real science keeps the disinformation and terrible practice alive. If I had a dime every time a random commenter gave me a link to an epidemiologic nutritional study, I could fund a double blind randomized one myself.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/29/plant-based-... — have fun reading the actual numbers in Tables 2, 3 and 4 of the linked paper.

I'm curious how one gets a 95% confidence on such a wide margin. I'm having trouble visualizing data that would give such a result. Is this just a result of a very wide distribution of data? Or is this done with shady statistics. The 95% seems to imply that there's data on either side of their chosen bounds. To my understanding, the real "beef" with the article is the choice of representing the data as "31%" when there's such a wide distribution. A more accurate statement would be that, "nearly everyone experienced some heightened risk of CHD with the actual risk varying largely, but firmly positive". Thoughts?

people who had less than 4% elevated risk composed 2.5% of the group, and people who had over 67% elevated risk composed 2.5% of the group

if normally distributed, two thirds would have elevated risk between 14% and 48%

that is to say, almost everyone has an elevated risk - so I have no idea why you are complaining about confidence intervals

Consuming a lot of TMAO is proven to be bad for the heart. Cod contains TMAO in great amounts.

Yet white fish is one of the most recommended heart healthy foods.

You have to be careful when talking about specific mechanisms in terms of Whole Foods. Nutrition can't be reduced down to single mechanisms to provide confident recommendations, and often times results are the opposite of what we would expect mechanistically.

it also has EPA and DHEA, so it's possible those offset the effects of too much iron

also, it's still lower than red meat, it's on the order of white meat

if you want an iron-rich fish you'd have to go up to bluefin tuna, which does have a red tint to its meat

First we have lot of studies based on statistics. There are also simple statistics which show than vegetarian live longer then meat eaters. Then we have the five blue zone where people do not eat meat and most of them are centenarians.

But some people do not support their habits to be changed and are ready to believe anything that confort their opinions. Even if their habits destroy the planet.

> We know red meat isn’t healthy

It's worth obfuscating this point. We don't know red meat isn't healthy.

Equally, we also don't know that red meat is healthy.

Without making a case for either side, readers should know that the field of nutrition is incredibly unclear, often times very individualized, and most of what people 'know' are just 'educated guesses'. For every study proving one side of the argument, you can find 10 studies proving the opposite side.

Agree. If you have a claim to make about nutrition, please back it up with a million person controlled study run over 60 years.

For one thing, the high level of saturated fats in beyond meat patties (25% of max daily recommended intake) could be considered unhealthy. On some other aspects it seems pretty decent, with good protein content and some added vitamins as well.

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