Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result. This will make PhD harder to get, so PhD’s will become more valuable (and more vetted), and we will have people verify published studies.
Why make it a PhD requirement? You'd end up with half-assed attempts to reproduce easy results and little mafia rings of my-reproduction-for-your-reproduction.
Much better to make reproducibility a valuable research contribution in and of its own and let "the market" take care of it. Create better incentives for all authors. For example, make it possible to submit the code for analysis alongside an article and highlight articles who do (similar to the open-access movement), create journals dedicated to reproducibility, measure successful reproduction attempts alongside citations of each article, etc.
> Much better to make reproducibility a valuable research contribution in and of its own and let "the market" take care of it.
"the market" is the same force that has led to the perverse incentives of constantly pushing new "discoveries" above validations. The small variations you have prescribed have been tried (to various degrees) and have not had an effect on aggregate behavior.
> Why make it a PhD requirement? You'd end up with half-assed attempts to reproduce easy results and little mafia rings of my-reproduction-for-your-reproduction.
The why is obvious. The purpose of a PHD is for the furthering of knowledge, so it's a perpetual source of motivation.
> You'd end up with half-assed attempts to reproduce easy results and little mafia rings of my-reproduction-for-your-reproduction.
That's how it might end up (largely based on the rigor of the PHD program), but it's better than what we have, which is no good incentive to reproduce results.
We (as a society) might start with assigning more value to reproduction in general. There is an implicit assumption that reproduction and verification (or falsification) of published results is somehow not worthy of time and attention.
Wow, I can't think of anything practically wrong with this.
I can think of plenty of reasons why it won't happen (notably the downward pressure on the candidate pipeline, which for a variety of reasons isn't an outcome research institutions don't want), but I'm wondering if the best place to apply the pressure would be the accreditation institutions and the Department of Education.
Might want a restriction like research from an unaffiliated institution / research group. I don't think reproducing results from someone in the same lab has much value.
Ah, that's a good idea. And it pushes a more adversarial dynamic that might motivate people to debunk eyebrow-raising conclusions from competing institutions.
So for each publication, you'd need to provide two serious attempts of reproducing other published results. You would make the reproductions yourself, but also anyone else could do them for you (here's where PhD students come in), but once used for a publication, they'd be "spent tokens". (No, I'm not going to even mention NFT. ..wait a minute, crap..)
From here it would follow that eventually all results would be reproduced (or failed to do so), until we eventually run out of results to reproduce and would need to shift the burden from two reproductions down to one—probably go from 2 to 1 in some stochastic manner. (Maybe also similar number of serious peer reviews of such reproductions would be required to keep the system running.)
Maybe we could make a new currency out of this. Actually, it sort of automatically does that by itself. I foresee no issues in this whatsover.
> Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result
Speaking for my own PhD (now around 25 years ago): it's hard enough getting one's own damned work to reproduce, never mind the work of a complete stranger.
I think the problem here is that articles and publications in general do not provide enough detail to reproduce the results. Even though, that is the exact reason you write an article -- to make research reproducible. Peer-reviewed journals should, and they progressively try to be more strict about it, enforce the necessary level of detail and open-sourcing of methods.
Reproduction in science is a though problem -- not only it requires specialist lab equipment, methods or procedures, but sometimes "a trick" is needed. Inconveniently, it may not be mentioned in the publication for whatever reason. Therefore, giving an unexperienced PhD a task of reproducing somebody's work may end up to be a futile effort. But the idea is neat in general, I think.
Today, I'd say reproduction of results is far more important than getting more research published.
I would even go so far as to say that peer review is worthless, it may well be time to replace it with peer reproduction as a prerequisite for having an article published.
Great idea! Reproducing is also a great way to understand the field, and can actually help you a lot with your own research and techniques.
This also ensures the most famous results are the most replicated. Hugely valuable to society since the most famous results also drive the most thinking / decisions / policies.
There is no replication problem here. It's a matter of opinion, mostly. I'm assuming since the article is paywalled, most people aren't reading and instead applying their own biases.
The challenging researchers are simply implying that the original study did not account for the positive effects of red meat (vaguely 'vitamins and minerals).
As the replication crisis grows, or we're simply becoming more aware of it, I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy. Much discussion has been had on what to do if it is the former but if it is the latter, what needs to change in the education process so studies are better designed to end up with errors so frequently?
Individual studies shouldn't be the primary focus. It shouldn't fall to every individual researcher to be fully accurate and honest. This is just not possible because people are imperfect, and have all the wrong incentives in many cases.
What we need is a system designed to deal with this better. My suggestion would be greater incentives to the publication of negative results, and incentives to reproduce research. Create a system that encourages reproduction as a second step to peer review. This should also increase quality. If your research can't be easily reproduced it's probably not doing a whole lot of good even if ultimately you got the right answers.
Peronsally, IMO: you should submit methodology--including the data analysis and statistical tests you'll perform, to a journal before the study has been conducted. Then, they say yes or no and if yes you perform the study and as long as it is performed to the approved specifications, you get published.
It sounds nice, but this will make for very boring journals with 90% negative results due to problems with the methodology.
Here an example of a typical project, where researchers are interested in the role of gene X in blood vessel formation in cancer, which could make it a good target for a cancer treatment. They want to knock the gene out and measure the blood vessel formation in an in vitro model.
Publication 1.
- We attempted to knock this gene out in this cell line, but due to an infection the cell line died. The installation was sterilized, the stored master cell bank was unfrozen, and we updated our sterilization protocols.
Publication 2.
- We attempted to knock this gene out in this cell line, but sequencing showed that there were off-target effects introduced. Reagents should be changed to be more specific.
Publication 3.
- The gene was succesfully knocked, but we found that a homologous gene appeared to activate the same pathway. The homologous gene should be knocked out as well to study the function of the gene.
Publication 4.
- The gene was successfully knocked out by disabling the gene and its homologue. The assay we used to study blood vessel formation was flawed. Due to insufficient oxygen supply, the positive and negative controls for blood vessel formation did not grow. New experiments should increase oxygen flow.
Publication 5.
- We successfully studied the function of the gene and found that it does not impact blood vessel formation in cell line x.
This is how the majority of research projects end up.
However, other researchers will be looking for a biological target to treat cancer X, and the information obtained by this series of experiments is not interesting. This is just one out of 99% of 30,000 genes that are not suitable treatment targets.
The conclusions are only interesting for researchers focused on gene x (and maybe its homologue), and potentially for researchers developing methodology. Questions answered were different than the original ones posed.
Wouldn't that just put the journals in control of what studies get performed (as well as what gets published)? Seems weird to give all that power to the journals.
It is a lot different because if the study isn't published in one journal, it could always be published in another. In this situation, the study wouldn't be done at all until a journal agreed to publish it.
Again that didn't change anything when compared to the current situation.
Journals do ask for exclusivity when they publish things. The don't ask for it just for submission. And the same reasons for why they don't now (nobody would submit anything to them) apply for the OP's idea.
In fact, all the changes only make the life of the researcher easier, because he would only have to present a proposal for the journals to deny. Now he has to complete his research before he gets the denial. (It also makes the life of the journals much harder, for the same reason.)
> Again that didn't change anything when compared to the current situation.
Journals do ask for exclusivity when they publish things. The don't ask for it just for submission.
You contradict yourself. It absolutely changes things.
> Now he has to complete his research before he gets the denial.
It could degrade the incentive for the researcher to do great work, if they knew that they would be published.
Despite his dubious past, the billionaire John Arnold has focused time and money to amend scientific research. I've read maybe 2 years ago about that endeavor and followed him on Twitter ; I found it quite interesting and original. For example, he offers researchers to save their initial data (before any screening) so that other researchers can check which cases were thrown out of the study. He also funded reproduction tests. I haven't followed since, so I hope he kept on doing good work.
Fraud is only a small part of the problem. No open data, poorly described methodology so reproductions sometimes aren't even possible, too little funding for reproductions, p-hacking, no incentives to publish negative results, journals incentivized to publish sensational results to increase their impact factor even though sensational results are likely false thus perpetuating misinformation. These are the main drivers.
In addition there needs to be tiers of publication that are purely objective. Maybe something along the lines of this paper was replicated by 3 different teams and the results hold up. Like a replication score or count- this would be desirable since then students could apply for funding to replicate papers.
The problem is that for any sufficiently complex or advanced research there are enough variables to contend with that there are 1000s of ways to get "no repeatable result" and only a few to actually replicate. Knowing which variables need to be controlled is part of the expertise, training, and lore. Knowing when those variables are getting out of control and how to fix them early (knowing which knob or often combination of knobs are required) is yet more expertise and experience. This is true in physics, chemistry, biology, and electronic design. Getting a null result really is often simply a failure to properly run the experiment... and as a scientist it would be very easy to follow any documented "recipe" and fail to get the proper result in hundreds of different ways. That does not make one a great scientist. You can't even tell me every way it could be screwed up. I can always come up with a new one!
Programming is such a wonderfully controlled environment, it's digital, replicable, and _almost_ math-like. You can know the variables. You can trivially replicate a program, or dig down into the OS... but every physical experiment out there has much more common and worse problems than Spectre or Rowhammer waiting to destroy it. It's the cosmic rays.
Your equipment/materials/specimens gets contaminated or reacts or ages. Your ultrapure water isn't. There's a vibration that changes everything. Your calibration sample changes. Cleaning staff used a new cleaner. The AC turned on. Build your experiment to be impervious to all of these and everything else I can't think of... or use the intelligence of an expert. Get there faster, cheaper, and find better ways of doing it along the way.
You'ld be right to say that it should all be documented, but the problem is that you basically need to be an expert to even understand the variables and to those experts many variables are so obvious to control they wouldn't think of doing otherwise. To give concrete and extremely valuable examples in manufacturing: EUV systems for lithography, OLED deposition and patterning, Lithium battery electrode forming. You can have the very best and exquisitely designed equipment for manufacture and yet without experienced experts running the process (replicating the experiment day in and day out) it will go out of control and you will get garbage in a million ways. It's like amateurs playing chess against a master... where the master is the natural variation of the environment.
High value semi manufacturing is a great example of how hard it is. The processes are designed to be as simple as possible to replicate. You replicate every day as many times as possible. You have huge amounts of money and resources to succeed and sometimes you still fail. Getting to 10% yield/replication is a big step... getting to 50% maybe harder... then 90%... and higher. Novel science is often harder and there's much less money and the time to replicate could be months/result rather than 1000s of testable results/min.
The whole point is that some people CAN replicate, but not everyone can, because the documentation for real (interesting) experiments would be so complex for a layman that they would likely become confused and never finish. If I give you and your 20 best friends a $300M EUV machine with all the documentation in the world, the best thing you could do is sell it for $10M in parts. Give it to TSMC or Intel's experts and they will make $Bs in chips at 50% margins. YOU can't replicate the experiment. Most people can't replicate the experiment, and being unable to do so does NOT make you special. However, some people can replicate it many millions of times a year.
Perhaps with some justification, perhaps not. But if replication is impossible because of "irreducible complexity" (seems to be the argument?) then why bother with science at all?
Things are not that bad. But in some fields other approaches may be more productive.
For example clinical medicine may have more to contribute than scientific medicine. Psychological studies in particular are notorious for being impossible to replicate. Does not mean we should give up on psychology. It does not have to be science to be useful
Prediction markets are an interesting alternative solution. If people can make money by correctly predicting the outcomes of experiments, and you have a way to prevent profit-driven bias impacting outcomes (e.g. independent experiment designers and performers, and the performers can't participate in the market but maybe get a cut of the transaction fees so that more "interesting" experiments get performed), then you get a pretty different research dynamic.
(I am paraphrasing Eliezer Yuskowsky here, specifically a small part of his NSFW and frankly weird collaborative fiction Mad Investor Chaos.)
Personally this is one of the reasons I chose to go into software instead of statistics when I was a young math major. The idea that you could make a small mistake that invalidates all your work and you might not even know it until much later or even never always made me uncomfortable. With software I can write tests till my neuroticism has been placated
If all the programmers who write tests go into industry and none of them go into academia, then the state of software in academia will be... oh, I see, the status quo.
1. Include the ones that passed and discard those that failed.
2. Run the tests several times and report only the best result.
3. Keep some of the details secret (data, some weird parameters, or maybe the whole repository), tweak something, run again, get some nice figures and publish a new paper.
"Poorly aligned incentives" in the nutritional sciences is, as far as I can tell, mostly various food lobbies getting their product to look good.
The reason there is "confusion" about whether many animal products are good or bad is because the corporations making billions of dollars off the product fund biased research.
Consider looking at the research digests from a non-profit (that sells no products, has no ads, etc) focusing on improving your health: https://nutritionfacts.org/
How a non-profit pays for hosting website cost, writing report, and so on and so on… being a non-profit doesn’t mean you are tied to corporations and free of any conflict of interest. If you start looking carefully you will see that most non-profit org aren’t unbiased and honest. And since long time…
For instance this whole vegan trend is based on some radical religious opinion to control fertility and lower class reproduction by promoting a hormonal dysfonctionnal diet. All those from “official scientific paper” written by those religious fanatic few decades ago.
It has probably been a mistake to have so many articles that are effectively "We measured A and its value suggests the following theory" rather than "To test theory B we measured A and found it did(n't) agree"
I reckon that lack of a good theory is the by far best predictor for non-replicable results.
I think there are several issues with this. In these fields, theories (not so fundamental ones) may not be very useful, in contrast with fields like Mathematics or Physics where a hypothesis may lead to a lot of other theoretical results. For example, if material A has property X, there will be a lot of applications for it, but this hypothesis cannot be used as a foundation for other theoretical research. As a result, it is not useful to just state a hypothesis: you have to verify it as well, and negative results are not really valued because it means nothing to others if you rejected something they don't care about.
Not sure if properties of materials is the best example, those tend to have some theory behind them that, if not explains, at least defines the property and its consequences. If one research team measures the stiffness of a material it's easy enough to make a test that replicates their result.
Medical research in particular seems to suffer a lot from papers where something has been measured with no supporting theory whatsoever and consequently no real information other than "If you do what we did you probably get the same result". Rather unsurprisingly this is hard to replicate because there's no theory telling you what is and isn't relevant to replicate.
I'm not saying this is easy to fix, but maybe we should focus more effort on papers that expand the theory, rather than papers that at best show that something might be the case but we don't know why.
It makes sense to me to first collect small amounts of data, only then formulate theories and only then verify those with larger experiments. Especially when experiments are expensive.
It does not make sense to act like small studies are proof of anything the way people like to use those studies on the internet. It is wrong that researchers are effectively punished for reproduction, verification etc. But the existence of small data collection studies on itself is not wrong.
Politics and education are certainly factors, but I would argue that they are minor. The bigger issue is the natural incentive structures that academia has created. If you want to have a career, you get both attention and funding in return for headline-grabbing results. This creates two huge second-order effects: first, everyone's incentivized to look for big impressive new effects. Second, focusing on confirmatory work is a great way to tank your career. And those create a third order effect: people who cut corners thrive, and there's not much to keep that in check because people who cautiously vet their work and others' get stuck in adjunct professor hell until they finally give up and exit the field.
Politics just adds some spin onto that. Education, I just don't think that's even a possible solution. The math involved in some of these fancier statistical techniques can be devilishly hard to get right, and it's often simply asking too much to expect someone to be an expert at both that and molecular biology. You could argue that that means people should look for competent co-authors to cover that side of things. But, see above - current incentive structures don't really favor the researcher who says, "I know! Let's bring on some nerd whose only job is to find reasons why we shouldn't publish!"
If we assign grant points to people that flood the precious journal space with fake articles claiming over-hyped promises, maybe we should give grant points also to the people able to spot the lies on those kind of articles.
After all they are serving to the advance of science also (and saving thousands of expensive hours of research to other). If you want to promote it, just create incentives.
Otherwise, If the cheater wins in a 95% of the times and the verifier does not have anything to gain (and will damage their own research by the time invested on this) after a while only cheaters remain [1]. At middle term, all research tend towards a sort of expensive shamanism in well illuminated white rooms.
[1] (And of course the non cheaters will be actively blocked from this point).
My proposal would be: If there was a clear, proven, intention of cheating and not just an error (we all commit stupid errors sometimes), the letter or communication of the people disclosing it will receive the same citation rank that the fake article had accumulated until that date. Good for the journals, good for the research.
From reading papers of various different types in the past few years it really depends a lot on the exact field in question.
Nutrition? Would be surprising if there's much political distortion there but there's lots of really bad methodologies, partly because it's hard to get good data (people are bad at reliably writing down what they eat).
Social bot/misinformation research? Basically just politics masquerading as science. Methodologies are invariably bogus and conclusions are clearly determined before any 'research' is done.
Epidemiology? A mix of bad incentives and ideological distortion. The focus on policy advice isn't really scientific, and their policies somehow always end up requiring massive state intervention in people's private lives. This isn't something that falls naturally out of the science (which is unreliable anyway) but more the fact that they don't even consider any other possibilities.
The above three are pretty bad fields. There are plenty of better ones. Computer science is mostly OK. AI and cryptography are slightly dubious. Stuff like databases or computer graphics are fine. So IMO it doesn't make sense to talk about research or academia in general, or it does but only when discussing the universal incentive problems. Some fields just seem naturally resistant to political game playing because they don't have much/any impact on social policy to begin with. Obviously I mean politics as in democratic politics here, not the more mundane everyday departmental politics.
Academia is pretty corrupt or corruptible (well, it's humans after all). If CS research isn't corrupted at the moment, it will be if it being corrupted becomes useful.
I don't know about hard CS, and I don't know about that word "corrupt" because it implies malice and I think that Hanlon's Razor is probably a useful heuristic here. But, in machine learning, I've see plenty of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Papers often introduce new algorithms or techniques whose improvement over the competition can plausibly be attributed to excessively tuned hyperparameters that overfit the data on one or more benchmarks. It's really not all that far removed from p-hacking in my opinion.
That's just hard to do with a topic like this. There are committed people on both sides of the issue who know what they want to hear. That's not a good environment for science to find a neutral answer.
You're framing this as if they're mutually exclusive options, which they're not. My impression is that it's "all of the above": the incentive structure in academics is completely broken, and this incentivizes both unethical practices, as well as being sloppy "to get things done".
I can think of numerous examples of both from my career, from working with various colleagues and in stories I've heard. All of this is the tip of the iceberg I think: what you hear about usually are cases of blatant fraud, with high-profile or high-importance research. The bulk of greyer malpractice, with softer squishier levels of ethical dubiousness, and more indirect, cumulative impacts on peoples' careers and literature trajectories, are more hidden.
It's gotten to the point where I no longer put much stock in the reputation of individual researchers. Too many times I know in the best case there's an institution, or department, or subcommunity, or doctoral students or postdocs behind it, with who knows what sort of manipulation or luck. In the worst case there's years of fraud or other forms of corruption. Call me inappropriately cynical but I didn't start out this way.
> I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy.
I think we should also consider the possibility that some of it might be ideologically motivated.
For example someone who thinks people shouldn’t eat red meat due to climate change, animal rights, etc. (and who possibly belongs to a social circle where such beliefs are popular) might be motivated to fabricate results that could convince some people to eat less red meat (hypothetically, not saying that is the case here).
In this case I'm pretty sure that the research in question was about the same quality as the work produced by Tobacco Industry Research Committee or the Sugar Research Foundation.
I think it is not enough of a sense of quality and too much pressure or gamification of getting things published. And fundamentally lots of researchers need to be more interested in finding the truth and considerably better at statistics.
Of the lead author of this critical letter, the article says:
"In her initial correspondence with The Lancet, Stanton declared that she was a part-time employee of Devenish Nutrition, an agricultural-technology and animal-feed company in which she also holds shares."
Should that matter much? Looking on their website it looks like they sell feeds for all sorts of animals, not just ones producing red meat. For most people, "not eating red meat" means eating pork/chicken not going vegan, so they don't stand to gain much from this study.
It's absolutely incredible how much more efficient cow milk is per kg compared to beef. Some of that must be because milk is even more watery than meat is, but the rest must come from being able to get milk from cows throughout their (kind of miserable, sadly) lifespan.
A huge amount of muscle is grown and destroyed cyclically as part of a cow's natural life. It's horrific, but imagine if meat could be "harvested" from living animals - how much would that improve beef's efficiency? Is there a less-abusive to sentient critters equivalent of this idea? (mushrooms?)
I think the equuvalent that still produces meat is lab grown meat. Then you can just grow the parts you need to eat it, which should be about as efficient as it gets once it's all figured out.
That's an option, but like switching to fish/vegetables/whatever, it's not something that most people actually do. This chart[1] shows that beef consumption has been falling since the 70s, but it's being more than made up for by the increase in chicken consumption.
You'd be surprised to know that there are some other stuff holding proteins that's not meat. Like fish or chickpeas, or lentils, or beans, or seeds, or buts, or broccoli...
Protein is not all you get from meat. If you want to replace meat, fine. But dont act like its just a protein swap. For instance you're not getting creatine and all the amino acids from beans amongst other nutrition.
I also dont really understand the full appeal as mono-cropping has devastated forests and animal species. And those harvesting machines kill many animals in the fields.
How does vegetarianism or veganism promote monoculture? I associate mono-cropping with production of animal feed and hyper-processed human feed, not with growing crops for vegans.
Right, but are people likely to switch to those when they find out that red meat is bad? Or are they more likely to switch to pork/chicken? My previous comment doesn't say those protein sources don't exist, only that people are unlikely to switch to them.
The main issue here is the bioavailability of those proteins when digesting.
red meat is 100% digested and bioavailable for all amino acid that are required for life.
Bio availability of protein in plant is far lower, and doesn’t cover the full amino-acid profile.
But well, I worship Darwin and let the vegans dying from malnutrition.
Latest story is that mother getting life sentence after killing her baby with vegan diet.
If it works for them, so be it. The one thing that this quite obvious with diet and nutrition is that there is no “one size fits all” diet for everyone.
You didn’t let them live enough long. Also please provide the complémentation list ( all the chemical they need to add into their daily diet to sustain this narrative).
No need to cherry pick far right elements of the bell curve. For centuries diet poor in meat is associated with bad health, shorter life and multiple specific diseases. This topic is widely reported on old littérature from 17th 18th and 19th centuries. 0 meat diet is malnutrition whatever the artifice you use to hide it.
Which cuts both ways. Neither of us know when they will die.
> No need to cherry pick far right elements of the bell curve.
Your comment specifically mentioned Darwin and dying. Most people will take that as quip on the “survival of the fittest” phrase, so I showed you examples of the fittest.
> all the chemical they need to add into their daily diet
Even if that were true, it does not support your point. Your claim was of malnutrition, you’re now shifting the goalpost to a value judgement on how that nutrition is ingested. All food is made up of chemical substances¹.
> This topic is widely reported on old littérature from 17th 18th and 19th centuries.
After asking for concrete data, your rebuttal is to offer none? I know we’re amidst a replication crisis², but a general hand wave to unspecified publications which don’t take into account the last century of science doesn’t advance the conversation.
Fortunately, it is possible to eat more than one foodstuff. Grains and beans is the classic combo. Grains are lacking in lysine, and beans are lacking in methionine, but together they make a complete protein. You don't even need to eat them in the same meal.
Yes, it's possible to mix and match at get close to a complete profile. But, this requires more accountability than people are willing to do with their own diets. People have a hard enough time not eating themselves into hyper-obesity, and now they have to factor in amino profiles verses just eating some red meat from time to time.
On the whole, I've met more unhealthy vegans and vegetarians than healthy ones.
> How do you know the diet of everyone you meet? How are you assessing the health of your acquaintances?
Oh, they'll tell you, together with their pronouns.
> Are things not worth doing because they are difficult? Exercising is pretty inconvenient - doesn't mean we should give up on it.
I've been vegan for long periods of time and I've always tended to veganism because of the science. When my symptoms started becoming intolerable and doctors said it was all "stress" I switched to carnivore.
I tried both sides and dieting while eating a high carb, low fat diet is insanely hard: you're hungry all the time and you keep snacking. You need to calorie count everything.
Dieting on a carnivore diet is easy. You'll get full by eating fat, you won't be able to put more in you. No calories counting needed, you're never hungry.
To me this suggests there is some motivation to do research on the subject, compared to someone who has no interest in the topic. At least disclosure of potential bias was acknowledged up front.
Would you agree that that it is also a conflict of interest if you are head of a scientific establishment in charge of making decisions that impact millions, and that the person responsible for judging the ethical dimensions of your actions, is your wife?
It's called a conflict of interest, and being worried about such conflicts is not paranoia, it is perfectly reasonable care. It adds quite a bit of doubt when the "truth" uncovered is particularly advantageous to the cause of the conflict.
Almost downvoted you now for explaining it! What's better than getting the downvotes from the ones that get it and don't agree plus the ones that don't get it but would agree? Cheff kiss
>In her initial correspondence with The Lancet, Stanton declared that she was a part-time employee of Devenish Nutrition, an agricultural-technology and animal-feed company in which she also holds shares.
>One of the co-authors of the open letter, Christopher Elliott, of Queen’s, declared grants to his research institute from Devenish.
The classic problem with self reporting food questionnaires is recall of the correct information. If anyone here knows accurately how many cups of ribs they had in the last year, (unless zero) you might as well just invent a random number.
I have no idea how you would even follow someone's diet closely enough to be even 50% accurate and for how long? Until someone is dead. Nobody is doing accurate research on this because it would cost too much and consequently the "science" that is done is meaningless.
Peter Attia makes some interesting suggestions on how to improve things (from David Allison's work) here [1].
I recently met several 'carnivores' who eat one to two pounds of meat every day, and only meat, dairy, fruit, honey, and water -- no other carbs, no sugar, no rice, no pasta, no bread, no wheat, no corn, no veggies(!) (apparently a lot of vegetables have something called "oxalates" and that's bad, though I know nothing about the topic), no alcohol, no nuts, no seeds, no seed oils, etc. They swear by it. I'd imagine that carnivores can probably estimate their red meat consumption very accurately, though I didn't ask the ones I met recently -- they were pretty sure of how much meat they eat each day, so I assume it's trivial to x365 to get "how much beef they had in the last year". Well, maybe not that trivial because some of them also have pork and chicken?
Carnivores are a fairly recent phenomenon.
The studies linking meat to health issues were done on the McDonald's and coke population.
There is also zero commercial interest in pushing meat over carb filled diets.
Look inside any supermarket. It's literally 95% non-meat processed food with long expiry date, an easy manufacturing process and the added benefit of keeping people addicted and hungry.
I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.
> so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists
Forgive me if I fell for deadpan sarcasm... but you're joking, right?
Commercial organizations who make money from the sale of environment (natural resources, such as petrolium, animals, crops) have orders of magnitude more money to spend to fund research than organizations which seek to protect those resources.
Crop-based corporations and Animal-based corporations tend to NOT be on same side.
This is ancient as the bible (the first murder, when the crop farmer murdered the animal farmer).
For example, one thing we now know, is that Coca-Cola (a crop-based company) bribed scientists to blame the obesity crisis on meat, and deflect it away from its own products.
So no, that person is not joking, animal rights activists are not fighting big-corpo only, they are ALSO helping big-corpo, they are just pawns in a chessboard that is too big for many of them realize they are pawns.
Crop-based corporations and Animal-based corporations tend to NOT be on same side.
This is ancient as the bible (the first murder, when the crop farmer murdered the animal farmer).
I don't know if anyone at Cargill has read the bible, but they are the largest ag company in the USA and raise livestock, food crops, and animal feed crops. They have over $100B in Global revenue each year.
Also, a large portion of crops go on to feed animals. There’s no way in hell they’re not aligned. Meat production is inextricably linked to agriculture.
When their common enemy is environmentalists, nature/animal welfare supporters (which includes those concerned with insect or soil life population), and human health experts (who raise issues with factory farmed meat effects on humans), the two forces you mention definitely do work together.
It is fair to say that crop corporations fight animal corporations less than they fight environmentalist/animal-welfare organizations.
There’s plenty of money and plenty of ideological conviction to produce negative papers on animal products. It’s not like it’s a hard battle of numbers where the winner takes all in the battle for public opinion.
I would point you to oil and gas vs climate. Tell me which of the two won for decades because of financial power.
We have only just now reached the point where the last group of anti-climate people have begun accepting that climate change is real. They've simply moved their argument to "it wasn't humans' fault". This is 100% because of the overwhelming influence of energy sector finances vs environmentalists.
The same goes on with food/animal topics.
Sure, the odd paper comes out showing that something bad is actually bad. But as HN talks about quite often, being a researcher is a difficult balance between producing research that pleases the financial backers and which is of real scientific value.
The standard of proof should be conducting actual science, not epidemiology or surveys. Epidemiology is good for some things, but as someone with an ongoing interest in health and especially metabolism, I don't believe epidemiology is very good at all for assessing what's optimal for human health unless the datapoints are overwhelming (ex. smokers have tar in their lungs that is rarely found in non smokers). Such evidence doesn't present itself against meat eating, nor dietary cholesterol or saturated fat. To assume that the science is settled for any one of those things in isolation is a display of ignorance of the highest order. Though they can be debated, as can anything.
But we're unlikely to see better scientific research because there's ethical problems around keeping people behind forcing people to eat specific foods and keeping them behind lock and key for observation, and so they don't eat a single gram of anything outside the boundaries of the study. Unless more of such research can be carried out, too much of what we do is uncontrolled to make meaningful observations about what's unhealthy and what's not.
What meat eating has that other diets don't have is not just the phenotype of our digestive systems (being like that of other meat eaters), or archaeological evidence of our ancestors using sharp tools and arrows, but stable isotope testing of fossil evidence linking our recent ancestors to a substantial amount of meat eating for around 4 million years. If you compare that to the amount of time we've had agriculture, ~30k years, the time in which we've been subsisting not only on more plants but plants selectively bred to be more nutritious than they were in the wild is a flash in the pan.
My opinion is that we should reconsider the ethics around researching nutrition, because it's been an overall failure, and has probably harmed more people than would scientific studies. This isn't to say that ethics in science should be abolished, but relying on the mouse model and epidemiology doesn't appear to be doing the most good.
> What meat eating has that other diets don't have is not just the phenotype of our digestive systems (being like that of other meat eaters), or archaeological evidence of our ancestors using sharp tools and arrows, but stable isotope testing of fossil evidence linking our recent ancestors to a substantial amount of meat eating for around 4 million years.
How would that invalidate research showing, for example, a link between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat? That some behaviour produces a competitive advantage at one time does not mean it comes without risk, nor that newer behaviours aren't better in some or even all ways, nor that it would remain advantageous for all time.
It wouldn't necessarily invalidate any research around a link to cancer. What it shows is that any link to cancer we currently have in regards to meat eating cannot be conclusive evidence that it's deleterious to such an extent that it is an unacceptable risk to the individual or the population as a whole. If humans developed to eat meat, that doesn't support the idea that red meat causing cancer (hypothetically speaking) is reason enough to avoid it. When people come from the perspective that humans are actually supposed to eat mostly plants, or that plants are generally good for us, or that meat is empty calories, the conclusion that follows from such studies is commonly "we should eat less meat." That is wrong. The idea that plants are better for humans and that meat is both devoid of nutrition and dangerous is by no means an uncommon viewpoint.
You are absolutely right about the cost-benefit balance in the case of cancer and red meat (or really in the consumption of anything). That's why it's important for people to understand our evolutionary past, even if it might seem peripheral to the cancer link itself. If we go into subjects like this with a flawed mindset, we'll get flawed results. If it was more commonly understood that meat isn't just tasty, non-nutritious, artery clogging filler food that greedy humans only recently started doing because slaughtering animals is fun, jumping to conclusions about red meat and cancer wouldn't be nearly as popular.
It’s well understood that meat was a calorie dense food that helped human beings not starve in the past. This was its primary evolutionary advantage.
In the world where food is abundant and chronic disease caused by overconsumption of calorie dense foods is extremely prevalent, it’s worth re-examining meat as a staple food. This is not touching on our polluted world and meat’s role as bioamplifier of toxins in our foood chain, along with a bunch of other good reasons to re-examine our relationship to meat as a society
It's hard to clearly go from "a link between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat" to a causal statement.
Like, it's plausible that the red meat is causing these cancers. It's also plausible to have a different cause - e.g. if people's lifestyles lead to a correlation between consumption of red meat and smoking (for the sake of argument - I have no idea if there actually is one) then we would observe a link between lung cancer and the consumption of red meat without there being any causal relation.
It's also quite plausible that certain ways of preparing food is causing these cancers (e.g. nitrates in bacon, and known carcinogens from high temperature frying on pan or open flame), and we're seeing the effect because we're currently often preparing red meat in this way, but replacing the red meat with fish or vegetarian equivalent in the same fried dish would still have the same carcinogens, and thus the intervention would not get the expected results.
So, a correlation between certain cancers and the consumption of red meat is a good probable cause for an investigation of the causal relationships, but I'd be wary of using it to argue for major dietary changes - the last decades had far too many counterproductive dietary recommendations (e.g. regarding cholesterol) because of non-causal evidence leading into wrong assumptions.
Ignoring that I haven't made any case for major dietary changes (not here, at least), and though I haven't read the GBD I doubt they will have said any more than a reduction in an individual's red meat consumption is probably a good thing - ignoring all that, I'm willing to bet they've taken into account an obvious factor like smoking. Additionally, the claim in the GBD, according to the Times, is regarding unprocessed red meat.
And indeed, correlations aren't causation, but the claim is “The study said it had identified causal relationships between eating red meat and coronary heart disease, breast cancer and strokes, on top of links already established with diabetes and colon cancer” and the "serious errors" are that “the study had failed to take into account the nutritional benefits of red meat as a source of vitamins, iron and protein, that should be weighed against any risks”. I find that a misleading use of the word "error". Don't you?
> My opinion is that we should reconsider the ethics around researching nutrition, because it's been an overall failure
That just isn’t true. Advances in nutritional science have had a major impact. Vitamin C made transatlantic shipping empires far more viable. The discovery of folate eliminated a whole class of birth defects. Fluoride improved the oral health of nations. The whole reason that nutritional science has any credulity today is that it had an unequivocal positive effect on mankind’s quality of life at barely any cost.
It’s the nexus between activist funding, friendly media channels, and the social promotion due to like minded folks interested in pressing a specific agenda that often causes some bad science and studies to leak out.
Where there is a large industry, there is a large anti-industry. To me, the point is that there is a large potential for bias in either direction so incentives to reproduce, validate, and otherwise test results need to be found and somehow added to the process. I would say that despite the size of this industry, this particular issue is the tip of the iceberg when you consider all the industries that have a significant impact on humans.
I agree but for different reasons... namely, our ancestors have lived off red meat for hundreds of thousands of years. We can still eat red meat our entire lives with minimal, or at the very least, hard to link direct consequences to our health. It can literally sustain a human for their entire lifespan - so asserting it is unhealthy should be an extremely high bar.
I don't understand this argument. Why does what our ancestors did mean it's either healthy or unhealthy? We know these things are not healthy or unhealthy enough to meaningfully affect reproduction so there shouldn't be an evolutionary argument.
Well, first off, you seem to be confusing the concept of survival of the fittest and evolution, which are two separate things. Evolution is nothing but the genetic mutations we get and give to our offspring. And it's happening constantly, regardless of whether it meaningfully affected reproduction. It's just that over long periods of time, mutations which are well adapted to helping a species survive their environments and reproduce tend to make it into the next generation. Thus, species tend to evolve/adapt to suit their environments.
So if our diets largely involved meat for millions of years during as our time as hunters and gatherers, it's likely we have evolved to eat and digest meat quite well by now without it negatively impacting our health. We do know we have eaten meat for at least a million of years, as we are omnivores and have some carnivorous teeth. And we likely evolved to be omnivores because it probably helped some of our ancient ancestors survive periods of food (plant) scarcity. Some evolutionary researchers think meat eating may even be apart of how we were able to develop our human intelligence.
But during those millions of years we didn't have the meat diet alternatives we have now, so how can you assume that meat is better (or worse) than those?
Given how incredibly complex human health is, it’s no trivial task to identify precisely how/why some specific behavior is “healthy” or “unhealthy”. Given that predicament, our best guide is what our ancestors did, since it’s passed the test of evolutionary time to at least get us to our present moment. The burden of proof is on any reformer to demonstrate why his reform is better than the tradition.
In the case of something as ancient as meat eating, which is so fundamental to our species as to be reflected in our very physiology (teeth, digestive system), this is an extremely high bar.
Not even just hundreds of thousands, but millions. At least 2.6 million, and possibly as far back as 4.5 million.
But yes, with the data being in favor of humans being meat eaters, absent any potential health consequences from such a diet (not that I personally believe there are), the science should be far more rigorous. Actually, much of it isn't science, because epidemiology is not a science any more than "computer science."
In case, if anyone here this wants some reading material, or to consider that the case against meat is anything but clear:
Behavioral Characteristics and Self-Reported Health Status among 2029 Adults Consuming a “Carnivore Diet”
^^ To be clear, I consider this kind of research as dubious as similar studies both refuting carnivory or supporting plant-based diets. What it does do is counter the idea that humans aren't supposed to eat meat on the same level as the evidence used to support that claim.
I somehow don't believe people ate meat in quantities we do today. Though yea people ate meat.
I can go to supermarket and eat red meat/chicken every day of the week - to hunt large animal it could take couple days. Of course there was more animals to be hunted but it is not like humans ate chicken breast all time.
They ate all kind of crappy meat, legs, tendons whatever they could eat. Best meat like steak or chicken breast was special occasion. People invented stew so they could have meat in multiple days so you eat a little bit of meat everyday.
Except that eating meat is a common activity globally for all of human history...
It would be like publishing a paper that says walking upright is harmful and then people start crab walking. Like yes you can explain many back problems with walking upright, but does that actually justify a different form of walking?
> eating meat is a common activity globally for all of human history...
That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.
This topic is "red" meat. That does not include fish, insects, and other non-red meats. The human diet was historically highly dependent upon whatever was locally available until the last 100 years (or less).
Also, the gut biomes of humans were historically very different than ours are today.
Now we have easy availability of lower quality meat (typical modern factory farmed meat which we consume larger quantities of), very different gut biomes, more sedentary lifestyles, and any number of other "new" things that make us abnormal humans in human history spectrum; so it's fair to believe that we could have some negative health effects from eating red meat.
> That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.
You don’t need written records to determine the broad strokes of early human diets. That’s an archeological problem for biological anthropologist who in fact have determined that meat entered the human diet around the time our brains grew substantially in size. There’s also cave paintings showing hunting of large animals by early humans.
The very fact that humans universally (barring medical exception) even have the capacity to digest meat is already indicative of this.
> whatever was locally available until the last 100 years
Agriculture was not invented 100 years ago. This is off by at least 2 orders of magnitude. Cows and goats were also domesticated over a very long period of time.
Perhaps by “locally available” you meant “locally available by means of farming and herding because humans lived near those”?
I never said that meat was not available for all of human history or that prehistoric humans did not consume meat.
I'm talking about the (low quality) quantities available to almost anyone almost anywhere in the world for a relatively low price. And from looking at developing economies, it seems increased consumption of meat is an intentional sign of increasing wealth.
As far as large scale domesticated animal production, that is a "relatively" new thing. Before modern transportation, there were many parts of the world where such meat was minimal or simply not available.
Also the quantity and dietary proportion of meat consumed has changed significantly. People may have eaten meat long ago, but it wasn't the staple nor a daily part of the meal for most people.
You don’t mention any time period there, but I assume you mean since the invention of agriculture. At least in temperate zones, people could not have survived on plant sources most of the year until agriculture.
Non-plant protein was probably consumed by almost every pre-historic human. Indeed the quantities were probably lower, but for those societies that consumed insects it could be quite high.
Crickets, grasshoppers, and many other insects have incredibly high protein/mass ratios and are readily available.
I have zero interest in consuming those forms, but I also 99% avoid any animal proteins. If a prime rib steak falls on my plate, however, I will not send it away!
But the agricultural revolution itself is probably one of man's greatest mistakes. It concentrated people, caused greatly increased population growth, ruined lands, created things to fight over, etc.
Pre-agriculture was likely a better natural global balance.
> That's a very bold stroke, especially since most of human history is unwritten and not well understood.
On the contrary, there is so much evidence of hominids, including humans, hunting and eating large game, that we name eras in prehistory after the tools constructed to aid this pursuit.
My comment wasn't long. I explain the "red" meat point just below that line which you have highlighted.
Indeed humans have probably always consumed some form of animal protein. But there's a lot more going on than just buying cheap ground beef from the supermarket as we can do now for very little cost.
The whole thing reads like lawyers talking about bugs in a spreasheet, without being willing to show the spreadsheet itself. And everything in the spreadsheet itself is survey data, not the results of experiments, which puts it on shaky footing to begin with. My own perspective is that this entire branch of research--trying to figure out risk factors for nutrition based on non-intervential studies--is a failed paradigm which cannot reasonably be expected to produce true conclusions, has a long history of producing false conclusions that were later overturned. It's basically pseudoscience.
No, it doesn't. That's the kind of attitude that ignores perfectly good science that proves something you don't like just because you didn't like the authors or what they stand for.
What drives the science is irrelevant in the question of whether it's still science. As long as the data and methodology are sound, science was done. It's when either or both are compromised in order to make false claims that something ceases to be science.
If that was true there would not be any need to declare funding.
Let's be real, everyone is funding their own agenda. If some scientist finds some effect that helps a corp or an activist group further their own mission, they get funding.
The finding might still be totally valid, but the visibility of the science and in particular the visibility of the science to the right people (legislators) can still be influenced by agenda driven entities.
So, the last 100 years of scientific research, then?
As long as science was done properly, the results are valid (even if the opinions on what those results mean may not be).
And if "not enough science was done" to rigorously investigate the entire landscape, that's not a failing of those doing the science. It's not their job to perform years-long work for nothing, so someone's going to have to pay for it, and academia has no money, independent research institutes only work on commission, and companies obviously only pay for studies they think will let them grow as a business. Especially in that last case, if the research does some funny stuff with the statistics (as is so often the case), that's on "us" (as in, the reviewers, publishers, and experts in the field) to call bullshit on, but "those who stand to gain pay for the research" has been driving research since before either of us was born.
Point is, you don't actually know what science is out there, because there are many layers between you and "the science". So people who mess with the visible of science or for that matter with the funding so that the science might not even happen, can influence your perception of what is true.
But it is, even if climate change is true. e.g. the original paper aim has nothing to do with climate change, but it mentions climate change 6 times in the paper and 5 more in the reference.
This is more that a flawed study, but a serious failing of comprehension. The assertion in more detail is that IGF-1 in meat causes illness at a predictable rate, but exercise causes large spikes in IGF-1 while being associated with a drop in cancer risk. Clearly the correlation between IGF-1 is not as simple as this study asserts.
@dang, can we link the actual journal article[0] instead of the embellished advert to eat more red meat?
Also, generally, diet is political in nature and I don't see its place here on HN. Had this article focused on something else, like the replication crisis as it pertains to nutrition research (like some of the comments seem to think), instead of promoting specific dietary views, I could see a healthy discussion starting. However, as it stands, there is nothing in the comments that is related to the article and productive. This seems to be a common trend, I can email you a list of links, if you're interested.
---
For my own edification; some thoughts after reading the journal, the comments and some supplementary links. I'm trying not to put on a tinfoil hat and I could be missing the point on some of these.
- The author performs funded research by and holds shares in an agri-tech company with a focus on poultry and swine[1]. This isn't an immediate conflict of interest in my mind (food professionals are commonly hired by agribusinesses), but just glancing at her previous publications[2], it's hard to find her arguing against livestock consumption in any way.
- What exactly are the 'serious errors' mentioned, specific to red meat consumption? The article's primary concerns seems to be that the GBD 2019 risk factor analysis[3] a) Changes the TMREL (theoretical minimum risk exposure level) for risks to be 0 (this isn't just for red meat) b) Categorizes red meat as a risk factor in the first place c) Fails to match up with other systematic reviews put up by other research organizations. One organization mentioned, NutriRECS[4], has substantial ties to the meat industry[5]
- The article fails to mention the fact that GBD groups "dietary factors" into one when linking to death, AND that there was decrease in diet-related burdens[6]. I don't see anywhere that the GDP study says red meat definitively equals more death. It's mentioned as an increased risk factor, but not elaborated on. Additionally, I don't know where this article's authors got their "36-fold" increase from. Could someone help me find that?
- I'm confused more about what a quality diet should be after reading this piece. So, it seems as though the article is successful.
The more I learn about nutritional science the less I trust it. The amount of corruption, incompetency, and political cherry picking routinely demonstrated by nutritional “scientists” is jaw dropping.
I’m heavily biased due to abiding many plants and focusing on meats resolving much of my auto immune issues, but even something as simple as the above isn’t fully accurate.
In my non-scientific, subjective take, I think we’d find more evidence looking into genetic/ancestral links to diets. I know it’s not a new thought, but it may give insights into why some people just handle meat or plants far better than others.
I tend to agree, however, it does strike me as odd that when I went on carnivore diet for a couple months, it was the best I had ever felt in my life. First week was awesome, every week after that was a chore. It’s just really boring.
I also went carnivore for a few months. Second week sucked because my gut bacteria offed themselves and new ones took a week to develop. Then I could digest food properly again. Eating high quality meet and using different spices made it exciting enough for me. I’ve since added some salad and nuts back into the diet
> this diet is called "keto", which is basically a combo of low carb and high protein
Sorry, but this is inaccurate. A Keto diet is basically low carbohydrate and high fat. Protein is generally consumed in relatively moderate amounts on a successful Keto diet. The goal of the keto diet is basically to replace the bodies preferred energy source from using glucose to using fat. Excess protein can be used by the liver to create glycogen and inhibit the bodies ability to burn fat for energy. Excess protein will mean you never reach ketosis, which is the measurement used to determine if your body is burning fat for energy instead of carbs.
It’s a common mistake though, because everybody assumes it’s high protein.
I was trying to fix gut dysbiosis / SIBO, from a bad case of food poisoning. I was willing to try anything. I slept deeper than ever, it temporarily fixed my stomach problems and I just felt great. I did it for 8 weeks, then transitioned back to regular foods. Now that I’m typing this, makes me want to try it again.
But taken together (I believe the statement should be written with commas instead of periods) that sentence fully answers your question - what is eating correctly? mostly plants, minimally processed. If you do that, you'll have no trouble managing proportions.
It would be super easy to create malnutrition of some sort with this advice (anemia for instance). You might not even end up managing proportions - it is fairly easy to end up hungry and then binge on bread, nuts, dried fruits or whatever else if the diet don't contain what you need.
The right composition of plants does matter great deal.
Cause you need to eat specific plants to NOT get anemia over time. If your choice of plants is pepper, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes, salad, potatoes, you get no iron.
You can eat plants and get enough iron (eat beans, also easy with meat), but it happens to be one condition I know about that most random dietary advice easily leads to.
If all you follow is eat "mostly plants, minimally processed" you are unlikely to eat enough meat to get enough iron. Especially if you are a woman. For the record, you can get enough iron with vegan diet too, but you need to set up food that way.
My issue is not with specific vegan/vegetarian/meat diet. My issue is with "all you need to know is this thing" kind of slogans a out diet, that are not true. You need to know more and you need to take into account a lot more too.
TIL about iron. Women are recommended 18mg of iron a day which equals 27oz of red meat. Pregnant women are recommended to have 27mg of iron, which requires a whopping 40oz of red meat. That sounds ridiculous- is anybody reaching these numbers naturally?
The world death rate is about 8 per 1000 people per year. If there are 50 pounds of edible meat on a body, then human deaths could supply 0.001 pounds per living person. This is also low-quality gamy meat because the average age of death among people is incredibly high for meat animals. Enacting worldwide cannibalism for humans would provide as much additional meat as spending one tenth of a cent per person annually on conventional low-end meat.
Since the median age of death is 82 (78 if free), riddled with an entire pharmacy of modern medicine i suspect that's a very, very unhealthy proposition.
