

Science, Pseudoscience, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Meat - greenyoda
http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat

======
DanBC
This article does a lousy job of explaining what the report actually says,
setting up some straw men to knock down.

There's pretty good evidence that burnt and smoked meat (see especially bad
barbecue and barbecue flavours) contribute to bowel cancers.

The authors have been clear about the limits of epidemiology. They were clear
about what the results actually mean. (maybe one year less in 90 year life
span).

------
dsrguru
Right, so people are often really bad at interpreting studies.

But in the case of this article, there _is_ an obvious causal mechanism
between eating beef and increasing your risk of heart disease. In fact, we
don't need a study to tell us that. Beef, especially the kind of corn-fed beef
that's very popular in the U.S. which comes from cattle who are confined to
tiny living quarters throughout their lives, has a much higher concentration
of saturated fat than, say, chicken. And we've consistently observed that
consuming large amounts of saturated fat increases your risk of cardiovascular
disease. So eating a lot of beef increases your saturated fat intake, which
increases your risk of cardiovascular disease. How is that hocus pocus?

~~~
prodigal_erik
Isn't Taubes claiming just the opposite was reported?

> And when these [randomized-controlled] experiments have been done, the meat-
> rich, bacon-rich Atkins diet almost invariably comes out ahead, not just in
> weight loss but also in heart disease and diabetes risk factors.

~~~
dsrguru
I must not have gotten that far in the article. But I seriously find that hard
to believe. I recognize that eating a diet rich in saturated fat and very low
in other calories would facilitate weight loss, but that saturated fat
increasing the risk of heart disease and the like has not been demonstrated
outside of studies that incorrectly assumed causation, and that such a diet is
likely healthful goes so far against my intuition and observation of almost
everyone I've ever interacted with (including many people whose lifestyle
decisions were otherwise relatively health-promoting) that I'll need to see
evidence to the contrary in order to replace this hypothesis as my dominant
theory. And my intuition has almost never proven wrong. XD

~~~
prodigal_erik
Heh. My own intuition is that we're good for roughly forty years of eating
just about anything we can find. Some specific diet which consistently gets us
more than that certainly hasn't been easy to identify, and I don't see why we
should expect one to exist; the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis> seems inconclusive so
far.

I say that having already reached 41…

