Total Meat Intake Is Associated with Life Expectancy | Hacker News Reader

Total Meat Intake Is Associated with Life Expectancy

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

> The established risk factors to life expectancy – caloric intake, urbanization, obesity and education levels – were included as the potential confounders.

Odd that they don't control for income (high or low). Quote from the first search result I read on life expectancy and poverty in the US: "You might expect two or three years of life differential ... but 10 or 15 years … it’s an immense difference".

And I remember years ago that two cars was an indicator for longer life - presumably due to signaling higher income.

It does control for education. Which is not quite as good but is probably a decent proxy.

> but 10 or 15 years … it’s an immense difference

IIRC there is a huge decrease for the last few percentiles. For males the difference between 50th percentile and 80th is about 2 years, and about 6 years compared to the top 1%.

For women the curve still exists but is a lot less steep.

Interestingly in some more well-off areas like New York City the life expectancy is fro the 10th and 50th percentiles is almost the same and then it start increasing at a much faster pace.

Did they control for additives and highly processed foods? Carbohydrates are more commonly over processed and adulterated with colors and preservatives than meats, with the exception of some fast food. Carb heavy stuff also more often contains a lot of sugar.

Did they control for income? Meats tend to be more expensive than other foods. Perhaps life expectancy is just correlating with income level here.

Associated positively, which argues against policies to make meat more expensive:

'Worldwide, bivariate correlation analyses revealed that meat intake is positively correlated with life expectancies. This relationship remained significant when influences of caloric intake, urbanization, obesity, education and carbohydrate crops were statistically controlled. Stepwise linear regression selected meat intake, not carbohydrate crops, as one of the significant predictors of life expectancy. In contrast, carbohydrate crops showed weak and negative correlation with life expectancy.'

Just make highly processed meat more expensive.

I enjoy being surprised when I start reading an article whose conclusion is the complete opposite of what I expected I was going to have read.

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