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Comment by yboris | Hacker News Reader

My understanding for the confusion with nutrition studies are all the lies - industry-funded one-sided "findings" in favor of the industry.

Why do you think there is any confusion about the overall health effects of eating meat, eggs, and dairy? With $ billions at stake - of course they find unethical ways to find some statistical anomaly to make their products good along some narrow dimension - and then have their money-funded media stories amplifying the lies.

I strongly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/ - a non-profit focusing on finding the signal through the noise.

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I disagree. nutritionfacts.org is a biased site that has been created by a vegan doctor who built his entire career on paid speaking about vegan pseudoscience. Several of the claims made by him have been debunked by independent sources.

Interesting. Do you have any examples? I'm familiar with Dr. Greger overstating certain things, but haven't been aware of any outright falsehoods.

Feel free to Google additional examples, there are plenty. The link below only analyzes a single video by Dr. Greger and finds it riddled with errors, mistakes and what I would consider outright lies. Many of the studies quoted as "evidence" are either flawed, incomplete, or simply misrepresented by Greger to fit his prefered narrative. I'm actually a believer in plant based diets but this guy is a modern day snake oil salesman.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes...

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/nutritionfacts-org/

Well, his book is titled 'How not to Die'. Seems a bit hyperbolic ;)

>Why do you think there is any confusion about the overall health effects of eating meat, eggs, and dairy?

Because I have genuinely no idea whether you think that meat, eggs, and dairy have positive or negative overall health effects.

Think it through - would a billion dollar industry have resources to pay people to run illegitimate studies to create sham findings in their favor? Is there a counter-balancing force with the same amount of financial backing?

Meat consumption has reliably been found to have bad effects on health.

I'm not saying your wrong, but I think you should take a step back and consider how this sounds to someone who doesn't share your opinion.

You're pretty much saying that, as long as you ignore the studies which you consider to be illegitimate, then the outcome of the science is clear.

The fact of the matter is that research showing that eating meat has a negative impact on health also suffers from conflicts of interest. Now, those conflicts of interest come from many researchers compassion for animals - and there's a big moral difference between that and conflicts of interest which come from the greed of the meat industry. But from a scientific perspective, it's not legitimate to simply dismiss one side and accept the other.

This feels like more of the "BOTH SIDES!" dilemma that's plagued politics and journalism for the past decade. Frankly, I don't understand how one distinguishes this from good ol' fashioned nihilism. If we're treating potential "compassion for animals" as a conflict of interest, there's not a study in history that could be completely free of conflict of interest.

Not everything has to be a both sides equivocation . Degree and severity matter. "Compassion for animals" and "receiving funding from a party with a vested interest in the outcome" are not equivalent conflicts of interest.

I think they're very different conflicts of interest from an ethical perspective. It is morally reprehensible to try to skew scientific results for greed. It is (in my view) not so morally reprehensible to try to skew scientific results because you want to stop animals from getting hurt.

But from the scientific perspective, there is a specific factual question: what are the effects of meat consumption on human health? Nutrition research is super finicky. Even absent any conflict of interest, it's unclear that nutrition results are trustworthy. So I don't think it's fair to throw out every study which says meat is healthy and just focus on the studies that say meat is unhealthy.

Fair enough. And I agree. It's not ok to toss out any study that says meat is healthy. But it _is_ fair to be deeply suspicious if it was funded by a financially interested party. And, for what it's worth, this should apply to avocado studies funded by Avocados From Mexico, orange juice studies funded by Tropicana, banana studies by Chiquita, etc.

Come on, they are both equally morally reprehensible as they erode trust in science and lead us towards darkness. Ends doesn't justify the means, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is basic level stuff.

I don't like either but they will never be equal in my mind.

Person A sees someone torturing a dog and kills them out of indignation.

Person B is a hitman-for-hire who doesn't know who he's killed or why.

Are person A and B really morally equivalent?

If they deliberately skewed their results to fit their narrative, yes: that's obviously reprehensible.

That's not what we're talking about, however. We're talking about what level of suspicion is appropriate in various scenarios. It's unlikely we can _know_ if results were purposefully sabotaged or not. We have to make some best guess. Interested parties funding studies is deeply suspicious, and should be treated with a hefty dose of skepticism. Hand waving that "maybe the researchers were motivated by empathy?!" is not at all equivalent. That is a incredibly low bar that, itself, undermines trust in science, as one could trivially make up similar excuses to distrust virtually any study ever conducted. Oh, researchers found declining sources of fresh water year over year? Biased. They probably just like cheap drinking water. Better ignore it. An Aquafina-backed study shows the opposite. That study is biased, too. But they're both equally morally reprehensible.

Wheat [1], Corn [2], Sugar [3], Fruit [4], etc. Are all multi-billion dollar industries as well. Are you equally skeptical of studies demonstrating the health effects of fruits and vegetables?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190362/total-us-wheat-pr... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1167209/leading-global-c... [3] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/05/12/266748.... [4] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/fruits-nuts/fresh-...

Calling wheat, corn, and sugar vegetables is a disingenuous stretch

I guess you missed the etc. But the fresh vegetable market is a 3/4 of a trillion dollar industry [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/vegetables/fresh-v...

Okay? So where are the studies funded by big veggie?

There are tons of them. Just as a quick example, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2019.1... this is a study who's funding came from the Produce for Better Health Foundation, which is a non-profit with the specific goal of increasing fruit and vegetable consumption. It's executive committee and financial partners are all produce industry execs and companies. They cite 422 references and if you go through them you'll find that many of them are funded by similar industry groups or directly from major produce companies.

I think today's money isn't even the problem and it is worse than just today's lies, but all the way to the underlying foundations at the bottom of nutrition "science". So much of the foundational work was done by the "scientists" at Wellville, a religious cult with weird business practices and business interests and some wild lack of scientific ethics (despite their "morality" as a religious cult), and some of the only replication studies of note were done by German scientists in the 1930s/1940s whose political motivations are all naturally suspect today.

I feel like it is beyond the "replication crisis" of any other science when your replication crisis involves potential war crimes. (p-hacking looks so quaint in comparison.)

If any other science had that sort of foundation and its replication problems that entire science would likely have been thrown out by now. A lot of people still think that there must be some sort of baby in all that extremely tainted bathwater and are afraid to throw it out.

(I have come to believe that nutrition science has become the last bastion of Phlogiston Theory in any of the sciences, and that is more damaging than people realize.)

Fortunately there's no industry around nutrition.

When you think everyone else is wrong and you are the smart one, well…

Do you think the same is true for fruits, vegetables and nuts?

Big Kale is infamous for its propaganda

For example:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/misunders...

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