
Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties - himaraya
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/well/eat/scientist-who-discredited-meat-guidelines-didnt-report-past-food-industry-ties.html
======
taylodl
_Dr. Johnston said the real problem is that people don’t want to accept
findings that contradict long-held views. “People have very strong opinions,”
he said. “Scientists should have intellectual curiosity and be open to
challenges to their data. Science is about debate, not about digging your
heels in.”_

There's a vast difference between not having intellectual curiosity and not
wanting to deal with cranks. Dr. Johnston is not challenging any data. He's
simply treated the data to a different type of analysis previously deemed
inappropriate for dietary studies and lo and behold, has achieved a different
result. Unless Dr. Johnston can show this analysis better describes observed
effects, which he has not even attempted to do, then there's no reason to give
any of this research a second look.

~~~
denzil_correa
There's a quote from the original NYT article that I found interesting.

> “It is important to recognize that this group reviewed the evidence and
> found the same risk from red and processed meat as have other experts,” she
> said in a statement. “So they’re not saying meat is less risky; they’re
> saying the risk that everyone agrees on is acceptable for individuals.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-
can...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-cancer.html)

~~~
bobcostas55
I don't think that's an accurate summary of the research. One key aspect of
their review is that they don't give much weight to (blatantly confounded)
correlational studies. Looking at RCTs that "same risk" is tiny and not
statistically significant. For example, looking at all-cause mortality,
correlational studies find a hazard ratio of .93, while RCTs find a hazard
ratio of .99.

They are definitely saying meat is less risky.

------
Sawamara
A coworker linked the original study to me, and was quite glib about how this
new study is quite reliable and so on. I checked it out, immediately got
suspicious by the article (that was even more nonsensical, since it was not
written by a scientist), then went into the study's summary instead, which was
already way more nuanced .

What mostly stood out to me: the study did not even try to discredit the hard
and overwhelming evidence that consuming red meat regularly does give you a
single-digit percent incrase of various types of cancers. They then proceeded
to give a summary that says that there is no point in worrying over such small
percentage likelihood increases, basically (I am obviously paraphrasing here,
so)

After that, we concluded with the coworker that yeah, this was not a holy
grail counter to "mainstream science", just one slightly fishy one.

But this does not diminish my trust in the scientific method. This just adds
one more example to the book 'why you should always try to at least
verify/clarify claims before blindly believing them'.

------
dxbydt
Key findings are here - [https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD](https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD)

At a 5% significance level, the hazard ratios posted there are clearly not
significant. Most of them are reasonably close to 1.0 - so there is basically
no difference in mortality between the control & treatment arm. Sample size is
very large, n=48000.

The data he used is public & verifiable, so am not sure what digging into this
person's private life has to do. Whether he is funded by meat industry or eats
beef himself is as relevant as the color of his underwear.

In the study, he says "issues of animal welfare and potential environmental
impact... is outside the scope. Related to this, we took an individual rather
than a societal perspective."

Taking an individual perspective is imo the right thing to do. He further
explicitly says if you are concerned about global warming etc. this study
isn't about that. So he's being blunt & honest.

Those who are batting for the other team, like the opposing researchers & NYT
etc. are questioning not the stats or the methodology but the fact that if you
make public policy based on this, it will undoubtedly be bad for the
environment. Which it will. But that's not the point of the study now, is it ?
The researcher himself says it is not the point.

~~~
iron0013
Recognizing a failure to disclose a conflict of interest is not “digging into
this person's private life“

------
vfc1
This kind of stuff should be forbidden, but unfortunately, it's left to
universities to regulate themselves. Some have guidelines that say don't take
research funding from the tobacco industry and other industries, others don't.

What is ironical, is that this new study DID conclude that there was a link
between chronic diseases and consumption of red meat, just like the others
before it, it was mostly dog bit men news. But of course, mainstream media
didn't read it.

They only read the incredible conclusion, that said that its was not worth for
meat eaters to stop eating meat to improve their health, since they like it so
much!

One of the authors of one of the studies came out and said that this was the
most outrageous abuse of data that he ever saw.

Neal Barnard from the Physicians Committee for responsible medicine pretty
much sums it up in this video -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYPYH93nVg8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYPYH93nVg8)

------
sbooher
If there is any information domain were it’s harder to figure out the real
truth than current US politics, it’s “nutrition science”. As someone who
actually tries to invest the time to check on sources and methods beyond the
clickbait headlines, it’s really a mess. Poor scientific methods
(observational studies), cherry-picking data to match a bias (Ancel Keys),
conflicts of interest all over the place, etc. At a very macro level it seems
like a few things are true: (a) 300,000 years of human evolution eating meat;
(b) per-capita leveling off or even a drop in consumption of red meat, that
didn’t stem the huge spikes in disease; and (c) being told to swap out good
fats (meat, eggs, dairy) for industrial seed oils and ‘fat-free’ cookies to
make up the calories, leading to an explosion of diabetes.

Fallacious arguments abound for the carnivore group all the way over to the
militant vegans who would want to tax or outlaw meat eating altogether, while
telling us to shut up and eat our processed patty of canola oil and isolated
pea protein. For now, I’ll keep eating like my grandparents ate - you know,
real food.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “Fallacious arguments abound for the carnivore group all the way over to the
> militant vegans who would want to tax or outlaw meat eating altogether,
> while telling us to shut up and eat our processed patty of canola oil and
> isolated pea protein. For now, I’ll keep eating like my grandparents ate -
> you know, real food.”

It sounds to me like just more bullshit food nostalgia nonsense and you’re
just perpetuating your own brand of unscientific nutrition opinion.
Researching that a bunch of other hypotheses are wrong or partially wrong
doesn’t mean your idea is right.

“Eating like my grandparents ate” for a lot of people in the US means a wildly
lopsided diet of mostly meat and a slew of convenience foods foisted on
consumers during the advent of mega supply chain processed foods. “Eating like
my great grandparents ate” usually means “eat whatever you can and don’t
complain” with no serious regard for nutrition or balance.

There are likely confounding effects in rate of disease, obesity, early death
etc. due much more to lifestyle differences, general sources of pollution,
sedentary habits, prevalence of jobs requiring hard physical work (where even
the same job in the same company today is likely partly automated or handled
differently to reduce physical labor), lack of good medical screening or
testing in past generations obfuscating knowing true rates of disease or
health problems due to diet back then, different structures for ensuring
screening in schools, etc. The sheer volume of confounding effects that would
have to be convincingly controlled for to compare causal impact of past
generations’ diets is staggering. If we can’t even get good science on simple
studies across cohorts _today_ , it seems like a ludicrous stretch to claim
universal positive causal effect from eating “like my grandparents ate.”

The tone of your last paragraph also makes it sound like you would not give
credence to ideas of choosing food options that reduce water depletion or CO2
emissions, or even the philosophy of just animal welfare and cruelty in even
small-time farming (not saying we know with great certainty what those choices
or green impacts would be, only that you seem to have made up your mind that
some Norman Rockwell Americana picture of green beans and chicken on the table
represents The Right Choice).

If you don’t actually feel that way, you may want to consider writing more
charitably and not invoking food nostalgia as the alternative to flawed modern
nutrition science.

~~~
sbooher
Hmmmm… The danger in the constant back and forth of poor nutrition science
being hyped up in the media, reversing last week’s headline, is that
eventually the general population just gives up, and stops listening/acting on
ANYTHING coming from this expert group.

Those who want to drive food guidelines by other factors than actual health,
should be honest about their motivations, whatever they are, rather than
claiming that they are scientifically/health driven. Arguments for animal
welfare, water use etc need to be backed by good science as well, not just
platitudes. I’ve had people try to make the argument to me that all the water
falling on all the pasture land in the US needs to be ‘counted against’ meat.
That because we treat some animals poorly, we should stop eating all of them,
rather than asking why we treat them that way, or how other countries might be
doing it better. I’ve yet to see a good study on the millions/billions(?) of
small animals that are killed in millions of acres of U.S. monocrops, but I’m
guessing it would be eye opening. For every warning statement on animal CO2
use, I can find a seemingly well done study on positive CO2 capture by
regenerative farms (i.e. traditional farms before feed lots). Carnivores on
Twitter seem to have had amazing individual successes getting rid of their own
specific inflammatory diseases, but then often assume that experience can be
extrapolated to everyone, and often discount the long-term health impact of
zeroing out plants completely…. It goes on and on.

Lastly, my statement about eating like my grandparents used the words “I” and
“my” and was obviously my own rule - hard to imagine what you found
‘uncharitable’ about that statement. I’m somewhat new to HN - are we not
allowed to share our own experiences here?

~~~
PerfectElement
>For every warning statement on animal CO2 use, I can find a seemingly well
done study on positive CO2 capture by regenerative farms (i.e. traditional
farms before feed lots).

It looks like you are actively looking for data that makes you feel good about
your habits and suspending critical thinking. The amount of evidence for the
negative impact of the animal industry on the environment is staggering.

~~~
sbooher
No, I actually think it's a large negative impact today, but rather than just
accepting that's the way it is, I wonder why. Why is the US food system geared
toward mass-scale industrial feed lots? What could be changed? On a trip to
Ireland I never saw a ruminant in a feed lot, only on pasture, and they were
slaughtered 1-2 years after our cattle. Why? Tax policy? Are other countries
just not as smart as we are?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Hmmm

[https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/revealed-factory-
feedlo...](https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/revealed-factory-feedlot-
contribution-to-irish-beef-kill/)

------
mindfulplay
First off, these diet studies are not science. It's a lot of drama and PR push
by so-called "scientists", it's a bit sickening to see this crap play out.

Observational studies on diets or food intake are useless to draw conclusions
that are then plastered all over Daily Mail and so on: people actually read
this shit seriously.and it affects people's lives. All based on shoddy, PR-
centric "science". I would actually want to see something like
"dietfraudwatch" that shames these researchers who don't have high standards
to begin with.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/KRWki](http://archive.is/KRWki)

------
PunchTornado
> as recently as December 2016 he was the senior author on a similar study
> that tried to discredit international health guidelines advising people to
> eat less sugar. That study, which also appeared in the Annals of Internal
> Medicine, was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, or
> ILSI, an industry trade group largely supported by agribusiness, food and
> pharmaceutical companies and whose members have included McDonald’s, Coca-
> Cola, PepsiCo and Cargill, one of the largest beef processors in North
> America.

I think this is enough for me to disregard that individual and anything he
says about nutrition. If you want to eat processed meat go ahead and eat it.
You can convince yourself it's healthy too. You can convince yourself sugar is
healthy.

~~~
dekhn
So, even if he published a replicable study that was convincing, you'd toss it
merely because of his affiliations?

That seems like... a poor way to do science.

Personally (I'm a PhD scientist in biology) I think a lot of the claims about
sugar aren't actually supported by the evidence and are in fact just driven by
super-egotist scientists who want peoeple to believe what they believe
(lookin' at you, Lustig).

~~~
belltaco
He didn't publish a replicable study, he just said the risk is acceptable.

~~~
dekhn
metastudies are trivial to replicate because there is no additional data
collection, etc. most metastudies are implemented as simple scripts that can
be run by somebody else.

------
rblion
I am starting to feel that academia and scientists have a lot more dogma than
they would care to admit.

People believe whatever they want to believe and find a 'paper' or 'stat' to
back it up.

In the end, a person should weigh out all the costs of a meat-heavy diet and
consider the all the benefits of a plant-heavy diet. It's not even a debate
for me.

I still allow myself to try unique food when I travel to fully experience a
culture. I don't overdo it though, my body just feels different when I eat
meat after getting used to life without it.

------
leoh
The key argument of the authors, it seemed to me, was that because there is
only low quality evidence (e.g. correlative) for the benefits of reducing meat
consumption. Thus, there isn't evidence to suggest that meat is bad. This
doesn't mean that there won't be overhwelming, high quality evidence in the
future. One of the authors, in an interview with The Economist, countered this
point, however, saying that it is extremely difficult to do sound nutrition
research at scale, so the best evidence that we'll ever have is that meat is
not bad for you. This signalled a big red flag for me.

------
brodouevencode
This smells like a non-story. There’s just not enough there.

~~~
L0stRegulator
Agreed. Seems like an ad-hominem.

There is often a huge lag between funding, submission for publication and
final publication. His interpretation of the rules would be widely agreed upon
as reasonable.

~~~
elif
Well, you don't have to attack the bias of the author. You can agree with the
author's findings that red meat consumption is correlated with the exact same
percentage increase in cancer rates as previous studies have shown. He has not
disputed that.

From there, you can say that his analysis is merely word-play.

"18% increase in likelihood for a 6% rate is only 1 more person per hundred on
a population scale. Therefore it is only a 1% increase on the population
level" is basically all he is saying.

It is fundamentally non-analysis imo: basic arithmetic meant to reframe
reality in a way convenient for a desired headline.

~~~
brokenkebab
Such logic can make anybody say "wordplay" about any study which contains
verbal interpretation of statistics, including the original metastudy.

~~~
elif
If a seatbelt makes you 50% safer in the event of a potentially fatal crash,
you wouldn't say "it's really a 4% difference because 8% of the population is
involved in a potentially fatal accident"

That is purposefully obfuscating the relevant data.

~~~
brokenkebab
The wording you used for your example is purposely unwieldy, but even so it
would be still logically valid. It's perfectly valid as well to say that it
obfuscates a particular point you are trying to make. However, as humans tend
to have different priorities, and values a wording you prefer may be validly
presented as obfuscating points other people see as more important.

~~~
elif
It is a perfectly reasonable example. Both are individual decisions one makes
for individual safety considerations. Introducing society-wide multipliers
makes it harder for an individual to make decisions based upon the data. When
I get in a car, I am not buckling up for society. When I invest food, I am not
making a decision for society.

Unless you believe the primary function of this research is to inform policy
decisions which have little to no effect, and not consumers, who have a very
direct effect?

~~~
DanBC
Risk does need to be presented both ways - relative and absilute - for anyone
to make any sense of it though.

People see 50% increase in risk and don't have enough information to make an
informed choice. If you tell them that we go from 2 people in a thousand
suffering ill effects to 3 people in a thousand they can make their choice.

See the work of Gerd Gigerenzer for plenty of examples of people caused harm
because they were told only the relative risk.

~~~
elif
But in this case, the extra variable adds weird implications that are simply
not true...

For instance, if half of the population became vegetarians, the rate of
colorectal cancer would go down, and red meat would become even more "safe."

~~~
DanBC
People aren't saying that.

They're saying if you have a population of 1,000 people who don't eat red meat
you'd expect to see 2 cases of DISEASE_X. If you take a similar population but
who do eat red meat you'd expect to see 3 cases of DISEASE_X.

That's a 50% increase, but that 50% relative risk number isn't enough
information for people to make any decision. Here we're talking about an extra
1 person in 1000 people. But if the numbers were 4 in 10 increasing to 6 in 10
that's still only a 50% increase.

We need the absolute risk numbers to get an understanding: 0.2% increases to
0.3%. Something that's unlikely to happen becomes marginally more likely to
happen.

This is not some weird obscure trickery. It's an important thing for people
receiving healthcare to understand. It's mainstream science.

[https://bestpractice.bmj.com/info/toolkit/practise-
ebm/under...](https://bestpractice.bmj.com/info/toolkit/practise-
ebm/understanding-risk/)

[https://www.eufic.org/en/understanding-
science/article/absol...](https://www.eufic.org/en/understanding-
science/article/absolute-vs.-relative-risk-infographic)

Have a look at the factbox and the icon array linked in this page:
[https://www.harding-center.mpg.de/en/fact-boxes/early-
detect...](https://www.harding-center.mpg.de/en/fact-boxes/early-detection-of-
cancer/prostate-cancer-early-detection)

But also, we should avoid using percentages and we should use natural
frequencies.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310025/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310025/)
Only about 1 in 4 people understand that 0.1% means 1 in 1000.

------
notadoc
> Scientist Who Discredited _______ Didn’t Report Past _____ Industry Ties

Fill in the blanks for many industry studies.

