Bad news if you're a tiger, I guess.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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no shit? hmmm
No shit. Nice someone did the study so they could get there.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
You do realize you're not obligated to respond to comments, right? If you don't know what you're talking about, you're allowed, encouraged even, to not respond.
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Most of the studies include processed meat like salami, which has known carcinogens and conflates the result to all red meat.
Except that salami is typically made of pork, which isn't a red meat. Most cured meats and sausages are pork based.
Nutritionally speaking pork is a red meat. All mammal meat is red meat, non mammal meat is not.
Just checked and you are right. I'm so used to hearing "Pork, the other white meat" that I mis-understood.
Yeah it was very clever marketing on their part. Don't blame you.
Next you'll tell me that cat's aren't white meat either....
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.
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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....
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.
The left/blue side of the graph are outcomes that show meat decreased all cause mortality, the right/red side of the graph are outcomes that show meat increases all cause mortality. If you were a hungry researcher, you could publish unending papers indicating either way from this same observational data pool! - Hence the constant news cycle driven by dietary agendas - not based on hard science RCTs.
The problem with open-ended observational studies, is you can't prove causation, and you can find tons of associations for or against whatever you like.
Grilling the data: application of specification curve analysis to red meat and all-cause mortality
when investigators analyze data from observational studies, there are often hundreds of equally justifiable ways of analyzing the data, each of which may produce results that vary in direction, magnitude, and statistical significance
Evidence shows that investigators’ prior beliefs and expectations influence their results [5]. In the presence of strong opinions, investigators’ beliefs and expectations may shape the literature to the detriment of empirical evidence
Then somebody will come along and do a metanalysis of the studies that were just basically association farming. And claim to find some universal truth.. at a certain point we have to look at these observational studies as not science, hell it's not even academics, it's advertising, propaganda, and agenda pushing. These are hypothesis generating, they should be the beginning of science, they are not the conclusion of science. And they should never be used for policies, or even marketed to lay people.
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No shit sherlock.
It also depends on the tone of the social media site discussing it.
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.
More than a quarter of the independent studies still found neutral outcomes though.
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This just in: sell-out fuckers suck.
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.