This is from Wikipedia. References are to solid science. Not to YouTube influencers.
This is from Wikipedia. References are to solid science. Not to YouTube influencers.
Especially when you use a quote which conveniently puts red and processed meat in the same basket to reach their conclusion.
I'll let you have this one, because as I said, it is quixotic trying to restore some kind of objectivity or educated discussion on dietary matters.
Even under the anthropological point of view, red meat which has sustained humanity for hundred of thousands of years, to "cause cancer" smells like biased nonsense from a mile away. I guess during the last ice age, when herbivores roamed the earth freely and in abundant numbers, the opportunist scavenger Homo Sapiens was eating chicken breast and leafy vegetables.
You would be a lot more convincing if you actually cited some papers.
The panelists on that channel are all doctors and scientists, with as many papers, science and citations you want. I'm not saying they are not biased, but here I am presenting my sources, which are not a sentence from Wikipedia or repeating Pollan's tired quote.
Yet some would want you to believe Big Meat or Big Keto is actually a thing behind doctors trying to reverse their patients' diabetes or atherosclerosis through the reduction of carbohydrates and the increase of natural, unprocessed foods, such as vegetables, animal meat and fats.
Trust me, it's much easier to market and sell low carb cereals or Impossible Burger, than the real thing everybody's trying their hardest to malign. If it's not beef is the major cause of climate change, it's because steak causes cancer.
How is this line of argument any better than biased studies?
Humans smoked tobacco for thousands of years too, or are you going to argue that smoking doesn't cause cancer either?
Also, humans used to walk dozens of miles a day. Humans used to not be 40% obese. Humans used to never eat refined sugar.
Lots of things have changed. And even if red meat didn't cause cancer in prehistory, cattle and pigs are raised differently now, and human dietary and mobility patterns are completely different today than even 100 years ago.
None of this is strong evidence for anything.
Trying to determine truth in metabolic science is super hard, and yes there are studies that point in all directions on basically any intervention. So people are understandably very wary of "well, let's toss all that out and start from some other first principles that happen to support my preexisting beliefs" like the "anthropological point of view" you describe.
Not all studies are equally bad, but basically all arguments about historical nutrition have so many confounds that they tell us very little about cause and effect, and a lot about priors (or "bias" as you refer to it elsewhere).
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.