3 ms·

It's far from one study that has found a link between red meat and heart disease. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=meat+heart+disease https://pubmed.ncbi.

• azalemeth 4y ago
  Indeed. The original article comes across as really quite biased too. Longitudinal cohort studies can never nail causality but they are quite good at providing measures of apparent risk. In cardiology, an odds ratio of about 1.2, called tiny by the article, can actually be considered quite large in some circumstances. Very roughly speaking, it's about equivalent to your risk per ten years of age of developing heart failure, or per 20 mmHg of systolic blood pressure [1]. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10557-022-07355-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10557-022-07355-7
  • radford-neal 4y ago
    The point isn't that an odds ratio of 1.2 is too small to be important. It is that if the estimated odds ratio from the study, with all its biases, is 1.2, then one can't be at all sure that the actual odds ratio is even greater than 1. (An odds ratio less than 1 would indicate that red meat was protective, rather than a risk factor.)
• Macha 4y ago
  It's possible for a paper to concur with the majority (or even objectively correct) consensus and still have issues with it's methodology. Imagine a paper that proved 2+2=4 by surveying preschoolers and going with the majority vote. Correct conclusion, questionable methodology.
  • erokar 4y ago
    For sure. Conflicts of interest are too common in nutrition research, and I think the criticism of this particular paper is laudable. I simply wanted to point out that there is significant indications from other studies that red meat, and in particular processed red meat, is correlated with heart disease (and cancer).