KempyKolibri

Yeah, it's that and the relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol isn't linear - once you're consuming a certain amount of dietary cholesterol, adding more doesn't make much difference to serum cholesterol.

So for some individuals with a super clean, low cholesterol diet, adding dietary cholesterol would significantly impact their serum cholesterol. But for many (arguably most), it won't make much of a difference, which is one of the reasons DC has moved down in importance in dietary guidelines.

This would be a fair analogy if we didn't have studies with a temporal component, but we do. We look at individuals before they get disease then track them over time to see what predicts disease. So we can see, per your analogy, that the fire is there, then the firefighters turn up.

I'm not sure I follow - is this what you're saying:

P1: exposure X is not causally linked to outcome Y if some individuals with lower exposure to X have outcome Y. P2: some individuals with lower exposure to serum cholesterol have heart attacks. C: serum cholesterol is not causally linked to heart attacks.

Because this has some wacky implications:

P1: exposure X is not causally linked to outcome Y if some individuals with lower exposure to X have outcome Y. P2: some individuals with lower exposure to cigarettes have lung cancer. C: smoking is not causally linked to lung cancer.

Why do we see lower mortality in mendelian randomisation studies for individuals with SNPs that code for lower cholesterol, then?

This doesn't question the cholesterol hypothesis. The link between higher ApoB and increased risk of CVD and death is one of (if not the) best understood and well researched exposure/outcome relationships in human health research.

We have converging evidence from in vitro studies, cohort studies, mendelian randomisation and randomised controlled trials all showing that lower ApoB/LDL results in reduced CVD and mortality.

What would it take to convince you that the cholesterol hypothesis is more likely true than false, if not all the above?

This doesn't really seem to pan out in reality. Often people with small dense LDL have it as a result of other risk markers. There's a good discussion here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kplh30RmYo8 - the long and short of it is that when you perform mutual adjustment for number of particles, both large and small LDL particles are associated with a fairly similar risk. But if you have the same mass of cholesterol in two individuals (LDL-c) and one has SD LDL and the other has LB LDL, the latter has fewer LDL particles and therefore lower risk, so it can appear that LB LDL are less risky if you're only measuring cholesterol mass.

As for statins not working well in primary prevention, I'm not sure what you mean - the JUPITER trial showed significant risk reductions for primary prevention, for example.

“It’s not just x, it’s y” every three sentences. Ugh.

I think that depends on context. In some cases (sweet vs salted popcorn) perhaps we could say that, but in others (rotten vs fresh meat) it may well still be subjective (there are people with heterodox taste preferences out there!), but I wouldn’t take it to be a red flag for narcissism.

There are plenty of subjective preferences that we can make comparative claims about without any risk of narcissism.

In what sense does it “question all knowledge”?

Currently yes. There are some really promising drugs in the pipeline that are doing well in trials, though.

What’s the practical difference as far as the appeal to nature argument you’re making goes? Humans lived for thousands of years on maggot-riddled meat, same as they did on parasite-riddled salmon.

Surely if it was good enough for us to live on back then, it’s part of the circle of life and should be totally fine. Right?

If one’s no longer acceptable because we don’t do it any more, then surely if lab meat gets established then we’ll look back at that parasite-riddled salmon with the same revulsion as we do the maggots.

Still not sure what your contention with the OP is. They said lab meat solves problems inherent to non-lab meat. This seems to be trivially true. It could also be true that consuming 10% of the meat you normally consume would also reduce the issues of meat consumption.

> It is almost impossible for western society to grasp that maybe the solution to sustainability problems is to align their consumption with the rest of the world instead of turning to technology to solve all their problems.

Not sure what persuasive power this is supposed to have. In the case of lab meat, the technological solution seems outright better than the “rest of the world” solution.

If the “rest of the world” solution is “eat less meat” then on an ethical basis, that is a worse option compared to lab meat. Sure, fewer sentient beings having their throats slit for taste pleasure is better than the status quo, but zero is even better than that.

Yeah, I'm personally very bullish on processed and ultra-processed food. If we make it that far as a race, I suspect in 100 years from now we'll be eating a more processed diet and it will be more healthful than our current diet.

Mix in the benefits you mentioned and it seems like a no-brainer to me.

I'm not sure I understand this argument. The point is that there are some serious issues with the production of meat that are not (or may not be in future) issues with lab grown meat.

It's true that you could solve this by only eating legumes, but you then go on to say you don't even eat only legumes yourself, you also consume meat. So for those times where you do consume meat, lab grown meat would solve the issues that come with that.

Totally get that you may have dietary/taste preferences that preclude consumption of these meats, but that sounds different to the OP's point that they potential solve a lot of issues with our current food supply.

What do you mean by “part of the circle of life”? I’m not sure why that would be a compelling reason to be ok with something either way?

For most of human history eating meat riddled with maggots was part of the circle of life, is it weird to be grossed out by eating meat riddled with maggots?

If one is going to make sweeping generalisations based on cross sectional data, you have to be open to all the sweeping generalisations.

So is it also easy to wonder if there’s a connection between high canola consumption and the fact we’re living longer than ever?

Yep, and we can even see it in others. I have little doubt that if the person I replied to was a passenger in a car, the driver got cut off by someone and they responded by making a sweeping generalisation about people of that race/gender/religion driving poorly they’d be able to identify the same bias at play.

As I say, my thesis is that these double standards/logical contradictions are intellectual tools to protect us from our cognitive dissonance. We’re not really operating from a set of logically coherent principles for the most part.

I say this without judgement or any belief that I’m not doing the same thing in a million areas in my life. Just to point out that this is why I lean more towards cultivated meat than outreach activism when it comes to veganising the world!

Eh, I think there are several reasons to favour the empirics we have on the subject over anecdotal experiences, which are going to be coloured by problematic biases (toupee fallacy, etc).

When we look at the data on the subject, both in terms of shorter term RCTs looking at biomarkers and longer term observational data, vegan diets seem non-inferior to the other top-tier dietary patterns we see for lifespan and healthspan (med, lacto-ovo vegetarian etc).

That said, I’m sympathetic to the view that with currently available foods one does have to be more mindful of diet than when on an omni diet - I think that’s true. But when an omni dieter looks unhealthy we just say “that guy looks rough” and when we see a vegan who looks unhealthy we say “vegan diets make you look rough”.

I think the world would be a better place if everyone went vegan.

However, I’m not convinced that vegan activism via pointing out that many people’s behaviours are at odds with their stated ethical preferences is particularly effective.

I suspect this is because many vegan activists make the assumption that people have ethical preferences which then drive their behaviour. For many (most?) people, though, I think they act the way that feels good to them and then come up with justifications for it post-hoc, even if those justifications are illogical.

As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.

With any luck, we’ll view our current generation’s treatment of animals with the same confusion we feel when we consider our forebears’ tolerance of slavery.

Bring on the cultured salmon!

Depends on the context, not necessarily weird. If the choice was between “world A” where sentient beings were perpetually bred into existence to be perpetually tortured until they died and “world B” where the breeding stopped and the beings became extinct, it would be insane to favour world A over B.

I don’t think people eating butter instead of canola oil is what upsets people.

It’s people ignoring the mountain of evidence that such a switch would be a backwards step for health outcomes and claiming the opposite because they read a book by the usual rogues’ gallery of science misinterpreters (Taubes, Teicholz, Shanahan).

The thing is, we don’t even have good evidence that UPF is necessarily harmful. Whey protein is UPF, but is associated with positive outcomes. Mass produced wholemeal bread is UPF, but is associated with good outcomes.

I’m not convinced that the “UPF” category adds anything useful over “HFSS” at this point. Happy to be pushed off my view, but seen nothing that would do so thus far.

The new(ish) Adobe Project Indigo attempts to rectify some of these - it generally captures pictures in a more SLR-ish manner, even when it outputs HDR. It does RAW capture and has decent control options if you want that.

However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image).

I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.

Yeah, same here I’m afraid. Could be a “me” thing, but I was going to download until I saw it was a subscription model.

Great piece - FYI there’s a typo in the tagline: “Turning LLMs into coding experts and how to take advantage <of?> them.”

Oh my god, I just thought my typing accuracy mysteriously dropped off at the Lock Screen.

My password is long enough that it’s not clear whether a new dot has appeared, but I get frequent rejections.

The smaller bins approach is adjustment via stratification.

Good primer on both here: https://www.mynutritionscience.com/p/statistical-adjustment

I think that’s a fair critique! Probably would have been better to say that the intuitive position was that smoking was unrelated to lung cancer.

I’ve heard Miguel Hernán’s “What If” is also excellent, but not got round to reading it.

Dismissing all observational study designs out of hand because they can be difficult and easy to perform poorly seems like quite the take.

I see this all the time in people’s interpretation of nutrition research, and they do exactly as this article suggests and fall back to the “intuitive option”, and go onto some woo diet that they eventually give up because they start feeling awful.

I would disagree that observational study designs should be thrown out the window or that it makes sense to, as this article seems to do, lump cross-sectional ecological data in with prospective cohort studies.

Things often “make intuitive sense” only because of these study designs. We used to get kids to smoke pipes to stave off chest infections because it made “intuitive sense” and it’s only because of observational studies that we now believe smoking causes lung cancer.

The direction of evidence from prospective cohort studies to RCTs in the field of nutrition science on intake vs intake shows a 92% agreement. If we take RCTs to be the “gold standard” of evidence that best tracks with reality, it seems a little odd that these deeply flawed observational studies that we should apparently disregard seem to do such a good job coming to the correct conclusions.

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...