7 ms·

Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

152 points by himaraya 7y ago

taylodl 7y ago
Dr. Johnston said the real problem is that people don’t want to accept findings that contradict long-held views. “People have very strong opinions,” he said. “Scientists should have intellectual curiosity and be open to challenges to their data. Science is about debate, not about digging your heels in.” There's a vast difference between not having intellectual curiosity and not wanting to deal with cranks. Dr. Johnston is not challenging any data. He's simply treated the data to a different type of analysis previously deemed inappropriate for dietary studies and lo and behold, has achieved a different result. Unless Dr. Johnston can show this analysis better describes observed effects, which he has not even attempted to do, then there's no reason to give any of this research a second look.
- denzil_correa 7y ago
  There's a quote from the original NYT article that I found interesting. > “It is important to recognize that this group reviewed the evidence and found the same risk from red and processed meat as have other experts,” she said in a statement. “So they’re not saying meat is less risky; they’re saying the risk that everyone agrees on is acceptable for individuals. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-cancer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-can...
  - bobcostas55 7y ago
    I don't think that's an accurate summary of the research. One key aspect of their review is that they don't give much weight to (blatantly confounded) correlational studies. Looking at RCTs that "same risk" is tiny and not statistically significant. For example, looking at all-cause mortality, correlational studies find a hazard ratio of .93, while RCTs find a hazard ratio of .99. They are definitely saying meat is less risky.
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/KRWki http://archive.is/KRWki
brodouevencode 7y ago
This smells like a non-story. There’s just not enough there.
- L0stRegulator 7y ago
  Agreed. Seems like an ad-hominem. There is often a huge lag between funding, submission for publication and final publication. His interpretation of the rules would be widely agreed upon as reasonable.
  - elif 7y ago
    Well, you don't have to attack the bias of the author. You can agree with the author's findings that red meat consumption is correlated with the exact same percentage increase in cancer rates as previous studies have shown. He has not disputed that. From there, you can say that his analysis is merely word-play. "18% increase in likelihood for a 6% rate is only 1 more person per hundred on a population scale. Therefore it is only a 1% increase on the population level" is basically all he is saying. It is fundamentally non-analysis imo: basic arithmetic meant to reframe reality in a way convenient for a desired headline.
    - brokenkebab 7y ago
      Such logic can make anybody say "wordplay" about any study which contains verbal interpretation of statistics, including the original metastudy.
      - elif 7y ago
        If a seatbelt makes you 50% safer in the event of a potentially fatal crash, you wouldn't say "it's really a 4% difference because 8% of the population is involved in a potentially fatal accident" That is purposefully obfuscating the relevant data.
        brokenkebab 7y ago
PunchTornado 7y ago
> as recently as December 2016 he was the senior author on a similar study that tried to discredit international health guidelines advising people to eat less sugar. That study, which also appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, or ILSI, an industry trade group largely supported by agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical companies and whose members have included McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cargill, one of the largest beef processors in North America. I think this is enough for me to disregard that individual and anything he says about nutrition. If you want to eat processed meat go ahead and eat it. You can convince yourself it's healthy too. You can convince yourself sugar is healthy.
- dekhn 7y ago
  So, even if he published a replicable study that was convincing, you'd toss it merely because of his affiliations? That seems like... a poor way to do science. Personally (I'm a PhD scientist in biology) I think a lot of the claims about sugar aren't actually supported by the evidence and are in fact just driven by super-egotist scientists who want peoeple to believe what they believe (lookin' at you, Lustig).
  - ssijak 7y ago
    Sugar is missused word in the diet world. Some groups of people (mostly keto and carnivore group, but others too) use sugar for every type of carbohydrate, lumping simple sugars, fibers and starches together. Lusting from what I remember does make distinction from the different types of carbs. And yes, not all carbs are the same. Some ARE bad, like simple sugars and processed fructose (unless eaten rarely and very moderately) but some are not, like starches from whole foods and fiber!
  - belltaco 7y ago
    He didn't publish a replicable study, he just said the risk is acceptable.
    - dekhn 7y ago
mindfulplay 7y ago
First off, these diet studies are not science. It's a lot of drama and PR push by so-called "scientists", it's a bit sickening to see this crap play out. Observational studies on diets or food intake are useless to draw conclusions that are then plastered all over Daily Mail and so on: people actually read this shit seriously.and it affects people's lives. All based on shoddy, PR-centric "science". I would actually want to see something like "dietfraudwatch" that shames these researchers who don't have high standards to begin with.
sbooher 7y ago
If there is any information domain were it’s harder to figure out the real truth than current US politics, it’s “nutrition science”. As someone who actually tries to invest the time to check on sources and methods beyond the clickbait headlines, it’s really a mess. Poor scientific methods (observational studies), cherry-picking data to match a bias (Ancel Keys), conflicts of interest all over the place, etc. At a very macro level it seems like a few things are true: (a) 300,000 years of human evolution eating meat; (b) per-capita leveling off or even a drop in consumption of red meat, that didn’t stem the huge spikes in disease; and (c) being told to swap out good fats (meat, eggs, dairy) for industrial seed oils and ‘fat-free’ cookies to make up the calories, leading to an explosion of diabetes. Fallacious arguments abound for the carnivore group all the way over to the militant vegans who would want to tax or outlaw meat eating altogether, while telling us to shut up and eat our processed patty of canola oil and isolated pea protein. For now, I’ll keep eating like my grandparents ate - you know, real food.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  There are many cultures with higher fat (French) and higher sodium (e.g. Japanese). So at least they can’t wholly explain the difference in health. While sugar consumption is markedly higher in the US, I do believe that a good portion of the health outcomes can be explained by the total unwalkability of most of the US. If walking is part of the regular routine, you don’t need an app to hit 10,000 steps per day. But most Americans only walk the distance from the parking space to the front door on a daily basis.
  - syshum 7y ago
    I would like to get a mobility scooter so I can avoid even having to walk that distance ;) /s One day we will have fully automated cars that will just drop us off right at the door
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      This is basically the world as imagined in Wall-E, just minus the spaceship and a few extra steps.
vfc1 7y ago
This kind of stuff should be forbidden, but unfortunately, it's left to universities to regulate themselves. Some have guidelines that say don't take research funding from the tobacco industry and other industries, others don't. What is ironical, is that this new study DID conclude that there was a link between chronic diseases and consumption of red meat, just like the others before it, it was mostly dog bit men news. But of course, mainstream media didn't read it. They only read the incredible conclusion, that said that its was not worth for meat eaters to stop eating meat to improve their health, since they like it so much! One of the authors of one of the studies came out and said that this was the most outrageous abuse of data that he ever saw. Neal Barnard from the Physicians Committee for responsible medicine pretty much sums it up in this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYPYH93nVg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYPYH93nVg8
Sawamara 7y ago
A coworker linked the original study to me, and was quite glib about how this new study is quite reliable and so on. I checked it out, immediately got suspicious by the article (that was even more nonsensical, since it was not written by a scientist), then went into the study's summary instead, which was already way more nuanced . What mostly stood out to me: the study did not even try to discredit the hard and overwhelming evidence that consuming red meat regularly does give you a single-digit percent incrase of various types of cancers. They then proceeded to give a summary that says that there is no point in worrying over such small percentage likelihood increases, basically (I am obviously paraphrasing here, so) After that, we concluded with the coworker that yeah, this was not a holy grail counter to "mainstream science", just one slightly fishy one. But this does not diminish my trust in the scientific method. This just adds one more example to the book 'why you should always try to at least verify/clarify claims before blindly believing them'.
leoh 7y ago
The key argument of the authors, it seemed to me, was that because there is only low quality evidence (e.g. correlative) for the benefits of reducing meat consumption. Thus, there isn't evidence to suggest that meat is bad. This doesn't mean that there won't be overhwelming, high quality evidence in the future. One of the authors, in an interview with The Economist, countered this point, however, saying that it is extremely difficult to do sound nutrition research at scale, so the best evidence that we'll ever have is that meat is not bad for you. This signalled a big red flag for me.
- briandear 7y ago
  Are any sane people suggesting that meat is bad for tigers that eat it? Or that vegetables are bad for cows? Then why are people trying to force the issue that meat is bad for omnivores such as humans? Meat isn’t bad for humans any more than any other food has the potential to be bad. If meat is bad for humans, that means they should die sooner right? And thus a dead human has not much of a carbon footprint. So humans dying sooner actually benefits the climate. Ergo, eating cows is actually better for the climate because they help humans die faster. Some socialist anti-cow climate nut job doesn’t actually care about my health anyway. I am a married white male libertarian with children, two cars, flies airplanes and watches baseball and likes to eat grilled meats — I am the last person these crusaders wants to be alive. So why would I trust politically oriented “studies” that contradict hundreds of thousands of years of human dietary history? Since when have the veganistas actually cared about human health? That whole crowd crows about over-population, yet they’re going to suddenly start caring about the health of someone eating meat? This is religion. Some out-group is “going to hell” if they don’t do <required arbitrary activity> desired by the group. We all must repent our climate-displeasing ways or the world will be destroyed by a vengeful God/climate/earth. Most climate activists have probably never read the Old Testament, but they seem to be following the spirit of it pretty well.
  - iron0013 7y ago
    Dear mods, if anyone on the left said something as polarized as “socialist anti-cow climate nut job“, they’d get a personal reprimand from dang. Is that going to happen for this guy, or not?
notadoc 7y ago
> Scientist Who Discredited _______ Didn’t Report Past _____ Industry Ties Fill in the blanks for many industry studies.
dxbydt 7y ago
Key findings are here - https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD At a 5% significance level, the hazard ratios posted there are clearly not significant. Most of them are reasonably close to 1.0 - so there is basically no difference in mortality between the control & treatment arm. Sample size is very large, n=48000. The data he used is public & verifiable, so am not sure what digging into this person's private life has to do. Whether he is funded by meat industry or eats beef himself is as relevant as the color of his underwear. In the study, he says "issues of animal welfare and potential environmental impact... is outside the scope. Related to this, we took an individual rather than a societal perspective." Taking an individual perspective is imo the right thing to do. He further explicitly says if you are concerned about global warming etc. this study isn't about that. So he's being blunt & honest. Those who are batting for the other team, like the opposing researchers & NYT etc. are questioning not the stats or the methodology but the fact that if you make public policy based on this, it will undoubtedly be bad for the environment. Which it will. But that's not the point of the study now, is it ? The researcher himself says it is not the point.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >The data he used is public & verifiable, so am not sure what digging into this person's private life has to do. Whether he is funded by meat industry or eats beef himself is as relevant as the color of his underwear. First, it's a matter of principle. Second, there are 1000 ways to slice and dice and present findings the way you want, even if the data are "public & verifiable". Heck, you can spin things even if the processing you did is reproducible and freely available (e.g. as a script) AND the results are against your bias -- in the wording and tone of your paper.
- iron0013 7y ago
  Recognizing a failure to disclose a conflict of interest is not “digging into this person's private life“
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rblion 7y ago
I am starting to feel that academia and scientists have a lot more dogma than they would care to admit. People believe whatever they want to believe and find a 'paper' or 'stat' to back it up. In the end, a person should weigh out all the costs of a meat-heavy diet and consider the all the benefits of a plant-heavy diet. It's not even a debate for me. I still allow myself to try unique food when I travel to fully experience a culture. I don't overdo it though, my body just feels different when I eat meat after getting used to life without it.

152 points by himaraya 7y ago

Dr. Johnston said the real problem is that people don’t want to accept findings that contradict long-held views. “People have very strong opinions,” he said. “Scientists should have intellectual curiosity and be open to challenges to their data. Science is about debate, not about digging your heels in.” There's a vast difference between not having intellectual curiosity and not wanting to deal with cranks. Dr. Johnston is not challenging any data. He's simply treated the data to a different type of analysis previously deemed inappropriate for dietary studies and lo and behold, has achieved a different result. Unless Dr. Johnston can show this analysis better describes observed effects, which he has not even attempted to do, then there's no reason to give any of this research a second look.

denzil_correa 7y ago
There's a quote from the original NYT article that I found interesting. > “It is important to recognize that this group reviewed the evidence and found the same risk from red and processed meat as have other experts,” she said in a statement. “So they’re not saying meat is less risky; they’re saying the risk that everyone agrees on is acceptable for individuals. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-cancer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-can...
- bobcostas55 7y ago
  I don't think that's an accurate summary of the research. One key aspect of their review is that they don't give much weight to (blatantly confounded) correlational studies. Looking at RCTs that "same risk" is tiny and not statistically significant. For example, looking at all-cause mortality, correlational studies find a hazard ratio of .93, while RCTs find a hazard ratio of .99. They are definitely saying meat is less risky.

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/KRWki http://archive.is/KRWki

brodouevencode 7y ago

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

L0stRegulator 7y ago
Agreed. Seems like an ad-hominem. There is often a huge lag between funding, submission for publication and final publication. His interpretation of the rules would be widely agreed upon as reasonable.
- elif 7y ago
  Well, you don't have to attack the bias of the author. You can agree with the author's findings that red meat consumption is correlated with the exact same percentage increase in cancer rates as previous studies have shown. He has not disputed that. From there, you can say that his analysis is merely word-play. "18% increase in likelihood for a 6% rate is only 1 more person per hundred on a population scale. Therefore it is only a 1% increase on the population level" is basically all he is saying. It is fundamentally non-analysis imo: basic arithmetic meant to reframe reality in a way convenient for a desired headline.
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    Such logic can make anybody say "wordplay" about any study which contains verbal interpretation of statistics, including the original metastudy.
    - elif 7y ago
      If a seatbelt makes you 50% safer in the event of a potentially fatal crash, you wouldn't say "it's really a 4% difference because 8% of the population is involved in a potentially fatal accident" That is purposefully obfuscating the relevant data.
      - brokenkebab 7y ago

PunchTornado 7y ago

> as recently as December 2016 he was the senior author on a similar study that tried to discredit international health guidelines advising people to eat less sugar. That study, which also appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, or ILSI, an industry trade group largely supported by agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical companies and whose members have included McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cargill, one of the largest beef processors in North America. I think this is enough for me to disregard that individual and anything he says about nutrition. If you want to eat processed meat go ahead and eat it. You can convince yourself it's healthy too. You can convince yourself sugar is healthy.

dekhn 7y ago
So, even if he published a replicable study that was convincing, you'd toss it merely because of his affiliations? That seems like... a poor way to do science. Personally (I'm a PhD scientist in biology) I think a lot of the claims about sugar aren't actually supported by the evidence and are in fact just driven by super-egotist scientists who want peoeple to believe what they believe (lookin' at you, Lustig).
- ssijak 7y ago
  Sugar is missused word in the diet world. Some groups of people (mostly keto and carnivore group, but others too) use sugar for every type of carbohydrate, lumping simple sugars, fibers and starches together. Lusting from what I remember does make distinction from the different types of carbs. And yes, not all carbs are the same. Some ARE bad, like simple sugars and processed fructose (unless eaten rarely and very moderately) but some are not, like starches from whole foods and fiber!
- belltaco 7y ago
  He didn't publish a replicable study, he just said the risk is acceptable.
  - dekhn 7y ago

mindfulplay 7y ago

First off, these diet studies are not science. It's a lot of drama and PR push by so-called "scientists", it's a bit sickening to see this crap play out. Observational studies on diets or food intake are useless to draw conclusions that are then plastered all over Daily Mail and so on: people actually read this shit seriously.and it affects people's lives. All based on shoddy, PR-centric "science". I would actually want to see something like "dietfraudwatch" that shames these researchers who don't have high standards to begin with.

sbooher 7y ago

If there is any information domain were it’s harder to figure out the real truth than current US politics, it’s “nutrition science”. As someone who actually tries to invest the time to check on sources and methods beyond the clickbait headlines, it’s really a mess. Poor scientific methods (observational studies), cherry-picking data to match a bias (Ancel Keys), conflicts of interest all over the place, etc. At a very macro level it seems like a few things are true: (a) 300,000 years of human evolution eating meat; (b) per-capita leveling off or even a drop in consumption of red meat, that didn’t stem the huge spikes in disease; and (c) being told to swap out good fats (meat, eggs, dairy) for industrial seed oils and ‘fat-free’ cookies to make up the calories, leading to an explosion of diabetes. Fallacious arguments abound for the carnivore group all the way over to the militant vegans who would want to tax or outlaw meat eating altogether, while telling us to shut up and eat our processed patty of canola oil and isolated pea protein. For now, I’ll keep eating like my grandparents ate - you know, real food.

bobthepanda 7y ago
There are many cultures with higher fat (French) and higher sodium (e.g. Japanese). So at least they can’t wholly explain the difference in health. While sugar consumption is markedly higher in the US, I do believe that a good portion of the health outcomes can be explained by the total unwalkability of most of the US. If walking is part of the regular routine, you don’t need an app to hit 10,000 steps per day. But most Americans only walk the distance from the parking space to the front door on a daily basis.
- syshum 7y ago
  I would like to get a mobility scooter so I can avoid even having to walk that distance ;) /s One day we will have fully automated cars that will just drop us off right at the door
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    This is basically the world as imagined in Wall-E, just minus the spaceship and a few extra steps.

vfc1 7y ago

This kind of stuff should be forbidden, but unfortunately, it's left to universities to regulate themselves. Some have guidelines that say don't take research funding from the tobacco industry and other industries, others don't. What is ironical, is that this new study DID conclude that there was a link between chronic diseases and consumption of red meat, just like the others before it, it was mostly dog bit men news. But of course, mainstream media didn't read it. They only read the incredible conclusion, that said that its was not worth for meat eaters to stop eating meat to improve their health, since they like it so much! One of the authors of one of the studies came out and said that this was the most outrageous abuse of data that he ever saw. Neal Barnard from the Physicians Committee for responsible medicine pretty much sums it up in this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYPYH93nVg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYPYH93nVg8

Sawamara 7y ago

A coworker linked the original study to me, and was quite glib about how this new study is quite reliable and so on. I checked it out, immediately got suspicious by the article (that was even more nonsensical, since it was not written by a scientist), then went into the study's summary instead, which was already way more nuanced . What mostly stood out to me: the study did not even try to discredit the hard and overwhelming evidence that consuming red meat regularly does give you a single-digit percent incrase of various types of cancers. They then proceeded to give a summary that says that there is no point in worrying over such small percentage likelihood increases, basically (I am obviously paraphrasing here, so) After that, we concluded with the coworker that yeah, this was not a holy grail counter to "mainstream science", just one slightly fishy one. But this does not diminish my trust in the scientific method. This just adds one more example to the book 'why you should always try to at least verify/clarify claims before blindly believing them'.

leoh 7y ago

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

briandear 7y ago
Are any sane people suggesting that meat is bad for tigers that eat it? Or that vegetables are bad for cows? Then why are people trying to force the issue that meat is bad for omnivores such as humans? Meat isn’t bad for humans any more than any other food has the potential to be bad. If meat is bad for humans, that means they should die sooner right? And thus a dead human has not much of a carbon footprint. So humans dying sooner actually benefits the climate. Ergo, eating cows is actually better for the climate because they help humans die faster. Some socialist anti-cow climate nut job doesn’t actually care about my health anyway. I am a married white male libertarian with children, two cars, flies airplanes and watches baseball and likes to eat grilled meats — I am the last person these crusaders wants to be alive. So why would I trust politically oriented “studies” that contradict hundreds of thousands of years of human dietary history? Since when have the veganistas actually cared about human health? That whole crowd crows about over-population, yet they’re going to suddenly start caring about the health of someone eating meat? This is religion. Some out-group is “going to hell” if they don’t do <required arbitrary activity> desired by the group. We all must repent our climate-displeasing ways or the world will be destroyed by a vengeful God/climate/earth. Most climate activists have probably never read the Old Testament, but they seem to be following the spirit of it pretty well.
- iron0013 7y ago
  Dear mods, if anyone on the left said something as polarized as “socialist anti-cow climate nut job“, they’d get a personal reprimand from dang. Is that going to happen for this guy, or not?

notadoc 7y ago

> Scientist Who Discredited _______ Didn’t Report Past _____ Industry Ties Fill in the blanks for many industry studies.

dxbydt 7y ago

Key findings are here - https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD At a 5% significance level, the hazard ratios posted there are clearly not significant. Most of them are reasonably close to 1.0 - so there is basically no difference in mortality between the control & treatment arm. Sample size is very large, n=48000. The data he used is public & verifiable, so am not sure what digging into this person's private life has to do. Whether he is funded by meat industry or eats beef himself is as relevant as the color of his underwear. In the study, he says "issues of animal welfare and potential environmental impact... is outside the scope. Related to this, we took an individual rather than a societal perspective." Taking an individual perspective is imo the right thing to do. He further explicitly says if you are concerned about global warming etc. this study isn't about that. So he's being blunt & honest. Those who are batting for the other team, like the opposing researchers & NYT etc. are questioning not the stats or the methodology but the fact that if you make public policy based on this, it will undoubtedly be bad for the environment. Which it will. But that's not the point of the study now, is it ? The researcher himself says it is not the point.

coldtea 7y ago
>The data he used is public & verifiable, so am not sure what digging into this person's private life has to do. Whether he is funded by meat industry or eats beef himself is as relevant as the color of his underwear. First, it's a matter of principle. Second, there are 1000 ways to slice and dice and present findings the way you want, even if the data are "public & verifiable". Heck, you can spin things even if the processing you did is reproducible and freely available (e.g. as a script) AND the results are against your bias -- in the wording and tone of your paper.
iron0013 7y ago
Recognizing a failure to disclose a conflict of interest is not “digging into this person's private life“
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

rblion 7y ago

I am starting to feel that academia and scientists have a lot more dogma than they would care to admit. People believe whatever they want to believe and find a 'paper' or 'stat' to back it up. In the end, a person should weigh out all the costs of a meat-heavy diet and consider the all the benefits of a plant-heavy diet. It's not even a debate for me. I still allow myself to try unique food when I travel to fully experience a culture. I don't overdo it though, my body just feels different when I eat meat after getting used to life without it.