Is red meat bad for health? Meta-study of 44 studies finds results depend on the sponsor. If the sponsor is impartial, studies find it's bad. Studies sponsored by the meat industry find the opposite

And this is yet another reason why we need independent science funding, kids

Science has been canceled until 2028
- Found the American.
Independent of whom/what?
- Industry
  Politics
  Excessive earmarking
  Your mom
- Seriously? Independent from anything and anyone that has an interest in the results going any specific way. How is that not obvious?

Ain't that a surprise. Studies on the effects sugary drinks have on your health backed by Coca Cola are also funny

"I just take scientists out and give them a bunch of funding for their research, and they always give me the results I want. Now of course they could always say no, but they won't because of the implication. You know, that if they produced results that disagreed with me, that I would refuse to fund future studies. Of course I would never do that, but they don't know that. So they give positive results for me. You know, because of the implication."

It's this comment that made me realize that Dennis is the human embodiment of our capitalistic system

And this kind of shit unfortunately is fuel for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy types. It's not just misinformation on social media that we have to thank for people's mistrust, it's also the scientists that downplayed how bad sugar is or who turned a blind eye to what cigarettes do in the interests of money.

The issue with many of these studies is that they compare people who eat red meat to those who either avoid it specifically or don’t eat meat at all. The problem is, red meat isn’t the only variable at play. Vegans and vegetarians, in particular, are likely to have much healthier lifestyles overall than someone who eats red meat - which is more or less synonymous with the “average person.”

What I’d really like to know is the difference between red meat eaters with healthy lifestyles, compared to both the average person and those who don’t eat meat at all.

Most of the studies include processed meat like salami, which has known carcinogens and conflates the result to all red meat.
- Every study conflates high sugar consumption with meat consumption. If a pizza is considered a serving of meat, in all fairness it should also be considered a serving of plant based foods. Carbohydrates make up the bulk of pizza. And those come exclusively from plants
  We know sugar is bad for health. These observational studies are useless unless they can control for sugar and carbohydrate intake as a factor.
- This particular linked study, that is the basis for this thread, limited itself to only unprocessed red meat.
- Except that salami is typically made of pork, which isn't a red meat. Most cured meats and sausages are pork based.
Would you be able to give examples of healthier behaviors that vegans and vegetarians perform that the general population does not?
If one made their choice to abstain from meat for ethical reasons and not health reasons I'm not sure their lifestyle would be drastically different from their counterparts, then again I'm not sure what particular behavior patterns you are referring to which could throw off studies.
- I abstain from meat for ethical reasons, a similar ethical reason encourages me to use public transit and bike instead of driving, to reduce my impact on life and the environment. This is anecdotal but most vegans/vegetarians I've known are concerned with their impact in general, it's rare that they only obstain from eating meat but do everything else as an average US meat-eated would.
- On average, there are far more people among vegetarians and vegans who generally pay more attention to what they eat and don’t eat, exercise more, and likely smoke and drink alcohol less as well. Obviously, there are exceptions - but I’m talking about averages here.
- since vegan fare is pretty limited, i think the first thing is that vegans don't eat nearly as much fast food. they probably eat out less overall. which is going to require a lifestyle that carves out time at home to cook or meal prep.
Not to mention most of the antimeat studies are observational food surveys with weak hazard ratio outcomes.
Most annoyingly the classification of "meat" is infuriating and biased. In some of the studies any sandwich, any pizza, any sugar covered possible meat containing item counts as meat. It's well established that sugar is very detrimental for health.
The only people avoiding sugar at large care about their health, so there is tremendous healthy user bias, and the advice for the last 50 years or so has been to avoid meat if you want to be healthy... Reinforcing the healthy user bias.
A high quality disciplined study to show the effect of meat on health would include metabolic markers like ketones, track sugar independently, and not use a once every 4 year food questionnaire.
The key to knowing if the study is serious, or sensational, is if they use relative risk or absolute risk in their findings. Nobody publishes absolute risk with respect to meat consumption....
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/red-meat#potential-harm
Did you read how any of the referenced studies were structured to confirm this assumption?
That may be a problem, but it wouldn't explain the differences in results due to sponsorships.
- Well, it would - in the sense that an unbiased study might still find that a meat-eater (i.e. the average person) is less healthy than someone who doesn’t eat meat, and then falsely conclude that meat is the reason, rather than accounting for all the other lifestyle differences. Meanwhile, a study funded by Big Meat would obviously find that meat is good for you - which, let’s not forget, could also be true.
If there was a study, I would volunteer. I'm an omnivore now for 20 years, after being vegetarian for about the same amount of time, never vegan. I live a reasonably healthy lifestyle but office job and do like to drink about thrice a week, only one drink (so moderate, I think) . I'm sure there are lifestyle matched vegetarians and vegans.
Personally I'm healthier but heavier (was underweight, now middle of healthy BMI which feels fat to me but I do literally feel good) with some meat in the diet but don't eat it every day. Cholesterol was high when I was vegetarian, still is. Only thing that drops that is regular fasting, which unfortunately was a reliable migraine trigger for me.

I'm reminded of the scientist paid for by big tobacco in Thank You for Smoking...

Is it dosage related or is any amount of red meat bad? And by red meat is it beef in particular or does it also include lambs and camels?

From a health perspective you can simplify it to mammals = red meat. Birds, fish, reptiles, insects etc = not red meat.
And yeah it's dosage based. Generally speaking you want to stay under 350g (by cooked weight) red meat a week. More than 500g a week is when it starts to be consistently linked with higher health risks. If you want to be really technical it could be said 0g is better than 350g, but in this range the increased risk tends to be near insignificant.
- I'll preface this by saying I didn't read the article, nor did I read any of the studies and underlying methodology so it has probably been addressed and corrected for but like a few of the other commentors have mentioned, by measuring it based upon consumption of a single item, it would be hard to see if it really just showed an indicator of overall consumption as opposed to a singular food being the cause.
  Lets say one of our sample respondents consume 350g of red meat on average in a week and that consisted of approximately 10% of their diet (by weight). Compare that to a person who had 350g of red meat on average in a week and it consisted of approximately 5% of their diet (by weight). This would be an Extreme example but the second person is literally consuming twice the amount of food (by mass).
A minority of us, but a growing minority, look at the data and come to the conclusion that the meat isn't the problem. It's the sugar and carbohydrates people eat with the meat that are the problem.
If you cut out all of the fructose, glucose, and carbohydrates from your diet. Your health outcomes are going to be amazing regardless of your meat consumption
- What data are you referring to?
- If you cut out all of the fructose, glucose, and carbohydrates from your diet.
  Problem is, these foodstuffs are cheap and easy to preserve and distribute. So a lot of what you're suggesting boils down to "if you buy more fresh produce" which ultimately means "if you spend more money on groceries that spoil faster".
  Even that doesn't address the relative health hazards of chronic high consumption of red meat when compared to white meat. But, again, we're talking about an enormously subsidized beef industry even compared to fish and chicken (where it seems we're intent on raising prices through ecological destruction/abysmal hygiene). The game still boils down to having this avalanche of surplus ground beef that's practically being given away next to healthier options that are far more expensive.

Did any of the studies find it delicious?

I've had my team of "experts in the obvious" work on this for one and a half minutes and they came to the same conclusion. This is a human greed business issue, not a science one.

Cool, can you show how big the effect is, based on your team's efforts? And what the distribution of values is, based on sponsor?
- It's bell curves all the way down, anything else is proprietary knowledge.

More than a quarter of the independent studies still found neutral outcomes though.

They also define independent as any study not associated with the meat industry.
There are biases in the other direction which were not weighted. How many of these studies are associated with vegans. Let's see that break down because I'm guessing their bias is worse than the meat industry's bias.
Most of the neutral ones compare to other animal proteins though, where the unfavorable ones compare to plant proteins.

Also, RoundUp is so safe you can drink it!

https://youtu.be/QWM_PgnoAtA?t=26

The cognitive dissonance...

No shit. Nice someone did the study so they could get there.

There is no such thing as an impartial sponsor; some are more obviously biased than others, but the belief in a fictitious impartiality is part of the problem. It shouldn't take a meta-study for people to see am obvious conflict of interest.

I'm biased. You are biased. Everyone is biased.

- I guess I didn't communicate my point effectively. I wasn't trying to nitpick semantics. I was trying to say that people don't think critically because they assume impartiality.
  If the first thing people did when they looked at a study was to ask what possible biases or conflicts of interest the sponsors have, then conducting a meta-study concluding that biased studies are biased wouldn't be news to anyone.
What if the sponsor is the blanket university funding for a professor's research? It may have some bias, but there is no steak in the actual result.
I expect to see "these results call for more research on the topic", but that's pretty much it.
- steak
  stake?
  Accepting funding from sponsors responsible for pollution & publishing environmental toxicology studies that disfavor those sponsors was pretty common at the university medical office where I worked.

Ok, now do coffee.

I haven't seen a lot, health-wise, that suggests coffee is detrimental. Environmentally it's a harder sell every year with climate change and the number of coffee drinkers still yet to peak, but the economics will counter that soon enough.
i read an old study that caffiene, had a affect against blood sugar, probably due to its diuretic effects.

No shit sherlock.

Just ask the carnivore diet lemmy.

Reporting in!
The observational weak relative risk studies can be pumped out infinitely, they do not inform on cause and effect sadly. The best data we have of prewesternized cultures eating meat heavy diets shows no incidence of cancer in these populations (first tribe nomads, inuit, etc). Humans have been eating meat for at least 2.5 million years, yet cancer has only jumped up to the epidemic it is today in the last 150 years. Something in the environment and diet has changed, absolutely. What is the causative factor? The anti-meat papers with weak relative risk tells me that its not the meat, we should be looking for a very strong signal (50% of people born today will have cancer in their lifetimes - 150 years ago basically nobody got cancer).
I could speculate, and I have my own theories, but we are looking for a significant change in the last 150 years as our culprit. Meat is not a new invention. Processed food, fructose, sugar, industrial food oils, pesticides in the food supply - all have bloomed in the last 150 years, I would hazard a guess and say these are the real harbingers of modern disease we need to focus on. Curiously these epidemiological food questionnaire papers don't look at these factors, maybe because its hard to fill in a survey for sugar (its in all processed food).
- Even if it wasn't an unhealthy diet it is egoistic as fuck.
- Humans have been eating meat for at least 2.5 million years, yet cancer has only jumped up to the epidemic it is today in the last 150 years. Something in the environment and diet has changed, absolutely. What is the causative factor? The anti-meat papers with weak relative risk tells me that its not the meat, we should be looking for a very strong signal (50% of people born today will have cancer in their lifetimes - 150 years ago basically nobody got cancer).
  Life expectancy in 1875 in the USA was 39.41 years. The vast majority of cancers will not cause significant illness (or show up at all) in population groups that die of other disease/injuries before 40 - so, handwaving away the studied correlative links with cancer in population groups today that eat a lot of meat just because 'people ate red meat 150 years ago and they didn't get cancer' is what scientists call 'illogical'.
  And that's completely ignoring the fact that we have far advanced medical technology in the last 150 years so we are actually diagnosing more cancers because we're finding them when they are smaller and more treatable (that's a good thing).

It also depends on the tone of the social media site discussing it.

A study of studies? That's interesting. I wonder how often that happens? I should do a study about it. A study of studies about studies.

A review of studies is a meta-analysis. What you're describing is a meta-meta-analysis, which is also a thing! Here's one I found from a cursory search..
- Alt text: Life goal #29 is to get enough of them rejected that I can publish a comparative analysis of the rejection letters.

This just in: sell-out fuckers suck.

no shit? hmmm

Rule of thumb: if the presented findings are not in the (commercial, political) interest of the sponsor, they are probably correct. If they do agree though, they are probably false or at least misleading.

Strange that YTubers have to announce if they’re a sponsored video but sponsored scientists don’t.

Read the end of any research paper and it indicates any possible conflicts of interest. Youtube isn't a reliable source.
They usually disclose their funding in the journal article. Otherwise, this meta analysis wouldn't be possible.

Capitalism bitch!

My father gave up red meat and soda around 2002. My dad's clone, my uncle didn't give up anything. Yes they are clones, I sequenced them myself. Since then my dad has always been at least 20lbs heavier than my uncle despite having almost identical activity levels since they had similar jobs and shared hobbies for most of the time. Now 23 years later my dad has heart congestive heart failure and a torn meniscus in his knee while my uncle has a perfect heart but has needed both knees replaced. I think the biggest difference is definitely the sugar because my uncle tends to drink diet soda and my dad fruit juice, tea and coffee.

One time a vegan saw me accidentally swallow a bug. They got super violent and tried killing me with their birkenstocks. Luckily they cried so hard they had an aneurysm right then and there. Everyone, cows chickens and humans, clapped at my bravery. The CEO of Tyson saw this and made me his protege and sole heir. Eat meat and avoid fruit juice guys, it worked for me.
- Lol, why'd this link get cross posted to c/vegan

In other news, it has been found that water, is indeed, wet.

Ah, I get it now. Thank you for the simple break down. I think we can all comfortably agree that meat is now....met.

I'm gonna eat it no matter the results because it's delicious.

Bad news if you're a tiger, I guess.

Does "bad for your health" mean "if we hadn't been doing this, life expectancy would be about 200 years"?

There's three metrics to think about:
Actual number of years reduced/increased
Actual probability of that change in lifespan
Statistical certainty that the trend we observe is actually linked to the variable we're studying.
Russian roulette (traditional 1 round in 6 chambers) in a hospice ward (where everyone has been given a prognosis of less than 6 months to live) would be a very high certainty of shaving months off the life of 1/6 of the studied population. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a very high risk. But at the same time, we can look at it and say "yes, shooting oneself with a revolver is very bad for health." Putting a more or less deadly round in the chamber is probably not going to be a hugely significant change in outcomes, even if we can objectively say that one is better or worse for the person's health than the other.
Almost all dietary/nutrition studies involve much smaller swings in lifespan or health conditions, probabilistically over a smaller portion of the population, with less statistical certainty in the observations. But the science is still worth doing, and analyzing, because that all adds up.