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Comment by naming_the_user | Hacker News Reader

It pays to be careful with studies like this because even if the statement given is proven to be true, that does not logically imply that it is optimal to reduce red meat consumption.

As a thought experiment (I'm completely making up these claims, but they do at least seem plausible), imagine a world in which regular coffee consumption resulted in some small increase in cancer risk, but then also regular coffee consumption was correlated with say, academic success, success at work, had some appetite suppressing effects, etc.

If the latter outweighs the former then the cancer risk is probably worth it even just longevity wise. Like how we know that going out in the sun increases cancer risk but also is just, well, good for us, to a degree.

But of course the media will just run with a headline, which is why it sometimes feels as if the science is constantly "changing".

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Average hn reader needs more sun exposure than he does because the vitD boost will probably worth the cancer risk.

With red meat the known benefits peaks (way) lower than average consumption. I’m not an expert but that looks to be shown more than the opposite. On a personal anecdote my doctor tells last week optimum is at 1meal/2weeks. He’s maybe not aware of breaking discoveries but this looks to be in range with what’s discussed here and there.

I like critical thinking nevertheless and it would be interesting to learn more.

Right. The question remains though about what we mean by "known benefits".

I chose caffeine as an example because I think that it's completely nontrivial to calculate. The physical pathways of things like "well this makes that molecule do this and have some x% chance to mutate and so on and so you get cancer", or the statistical output of "well people in the coffee cohort have % higher rates of this cancer" are much easier to accurately study than things like "if you drink coffee you are 3% more likely to get into law school and therefore become significantly wealthier and probably live a longer/healthier life and we can measure that impact precisely".

It's also not at all obvious that lifespan above all else is the thing to maximise. e.g. maybe red meat reduces lifespan but makes your 20s-60s more fun because you're likely to be more muscular or whatever.

My personal feeling is that aside from really really bad things like smoking, heavy alcohol use, heroin etc the error bars are too large to make decisions purely on long-term health impact alone.

Why are you so eager to fantasize about some "other benefit" with no evidence whatsoever of it, while evidence is presented on the harmful effects in many studies at this point. Would you think the same way about "poisons" or plastic contamination? Pollution?

Correlation != causation and all of that, but as the US has increased meat consumption and processed foods colon cancer has been on the rise, including younger and younger adults.

Why would you think the same way about the benefits of plastic contamination as the benefits of red meat? One was consumed for millions of the years, the other has been around for decades.

Not in anywhere near the amounts today due to how much work it was to hunt. And far less vegetables and fruit.

There are plenty of benefits to eating red meat. It’s one of if not the most nutritious food we know of.

Yes and is eaten at greater amounts today than our ancestors. You can have too much iron among many other things. Notice how this study talks about EXCESSIVE use.

I wrote this in another comment earlier, but red meat is the most energy-efficient food source available for consumption in digestive terms, simply because our bodies were designed to process large amounts of protein rapidly - compared to plant matter that needs to be broken down multiple times. There's a reason herbivores have 4 stomachs. Human bodies basically evolved as Apex predators and a meat diet helped that, as well as was responsible for it. Meat, berries and tubers for hunter-gatherers to put it succinctly.

We only adopted carbs because back in the day, cereals were the most efficient way to feed a large population (compared to say large-scale veggie cultivation) for an active societal workforce. But with us slowly and inevitably turning into lumbering sedentary creatures, it makes no sense to continue eating as many carbs as we are culturally accustomed to, instead resorting to meats and veggies to adequately cover up that deficit. Unfortunately, you need a ton of veggies to make up that deficit, but you can make do with a much smaller sized portion of meat than you're usually accustomed to (as we see with East Asian diets).

Why are you treating vegetarianism as the alternative to red meat?

You can drastically reduce the “redness” of your diet by eating chicken and fish. Even pork is less “red” though I’m not sure if it counts as red meat for this study.

The issue is that chicken in the US (even the "free-range" ones) are often factory-farmed, else I would have gladly recommended it. I was extremely astounded by the (high) quality of free-range chicken and eggs one can get in the UK. In the US, it's more likely for your grassfed beef to be free-range than it is for your chicken.

Coming from a heavily pescetarian culture, I wouldn't recommend a lot of seafood today. Fish are loaded with oceanic carcinogens, not to mention you have even little control over how they're sourced (it's nearly always a factory ship).

You can get some energy quickly from proteins like meat, but you cannot get enough energy for a day of work.

Humans need to get most of the energy either from fat or from carbohydrates like starch, otherwise they die.

Even for the speed of obtaining energy from food, nothing beats a mixture of glucose with fructose, like long-distance runners or cyclists have to consume, if they want to win.

Red meat may be very tasty, but it is not the best for any criterion. As a source of proteins, lean white meat is superior, e.g. turkey breast, chicken breast or fillet from various kinds of fish with white meat, e.g. cod or zander.

As a source of energy, any food rich in starch or in oil is superior and also many times cheaper.

During the last few tens of thousands of years, the humans have evolved to be much better at digesting starch than their ancestors and than most other apes or monkeys, by increasing the ability to synthesize the enzymes used in starch digestion.

So our body physiology has already shifted somewhat from being best adapted to a hunter lifestyle to one where the plant seeds can satisfy most of the energy requirements.

Meat still remains one of the best choices as a source of proteins, but not as a source of energy.

> You can get some energy quickly from proteins like meat, but you cannot get enough energy for a day of work. Humans need to get most of the energy either from fat or from carbohydrates like starch, otherwise they die.

That itself is a fallacious notion. Mammals can get energy from a multitude of sources, including carbs, proteins and fats. True, carbs are the fastest source and are prioritized first by the body, and any surplus is converted to fat, which is then stored as lipids. But fats are slower than proteins to digest, which take the second order in priority. The body breaks down protein to generate energy in the absence of carbs.

You could make do with eating a much lower portion of carbs and still cover your energy intake needs, as the world has moved on from an active lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle. But you can't forgo the protein you get from meat and adequately substitute it, unless you eat exorbitant amounts of legumes. On a societal scale, it's much simpler to just have cattle around and eat on some grass, instead of allocating land to grow a bunch of legumes - one buffalo would be enough to feed a small village and some more.

You're right in that white meat is superior, but white meat in the US has a much higher chance of being factory farmed than white meat. The carcinogenicity of red meat largely comes from the use of chemical preservatives used in cleaning before freezing the meat - something fresh grass fed beef doesn't have to contend with.

Fish and seafood is another good source of protein, unfortunately they might be as carcinogenic as frozen red meat due to the amount of toxic chemicals we dump into our seas.

I’d wait for the results of this study to be expanded upon in any case before claiming causality. I didn’t read the study but I can think of half a dozen reasons why the claim in the article wouldn’t mean higher red meat intake -> higher cancer risk.

I’m fine with other people eating less red meat since that means less competition for me, but I’d still encourage healthy skepticism when people tell you to eat less of something that we’ve eaten since the dawn of our being and replace that in any degree with something novel.

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