7 ms·

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 environment

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.

gpt5 4y ago
You could make the same argument about a study that says that meat is good.
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  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?
  - z9znz 4y ago
    > 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.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      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.
      - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        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.
        z9znz 4y ago
        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.
    - surfpel 4y ago
      This comment is ignorant of a lot of things. > 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”?
      - z9znz 4y ago
        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.
    - samatman 4y ago
      > 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.
      - z9znz 4y ago
        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.
        samatman 4y ago
        It's not a probably. That and your carrying the goalposts with you as you wander about makes this an unproductive conversation to continue.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    Or it could be like publishing a paper that says smoking tobacco is harmful and then people cut down their smoking and… become healthier. Like yes you can explain many airway problems with smoking, but does that actually justify not smoking? I hope that helps show that injecting such obvious bias into your examples introduces obvious weaknesses, too.
crims0n 4y ago
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.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  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” https://academic.oup.com/cdn/article/5/12/nzab133/6415894 https://academic.oup.com/cdn/article/5/12/nzab133/6415894 ^^ 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. Why Humans Eat Meat https://www.history.com/news/why-humans-eat-meat https://www.history.com/news/why-humans-eat-meat For 2 Million Years, Humans Ate Meat And Little Else https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate-meat-and-little-else-study/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate... Exceptionally high δ15N values in collagen single amino acids confirm Neandertals as high-trophic level carnivores https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6421459/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6421459/ Stable isotope dietary analysis of the Tianyuan 1 early modern human https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706269/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706269/ Evolutionary basis for the human diet: consequences for human health https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733113/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733113/ Comparative Digestive Physiology https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458075/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458075/
  - 4y ago
ravenstine 4y ago
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.
- brigandish 4y ago
  > 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.
mattgperry 4y ago
The inverse is probably more true, being the animal industry is extraordinarily well funded and established?
z9znz 4y ago
> 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- speeder 4y ago
  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.
  - Johnny555 4y ago
    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.
    - 8ytecoder 4y ago
      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.
  - shzusnwxbwj 4y ago
samloveshummus 4y ago
Meat is a $2 trillion industry globally but you're primarily worried about the corrupting influence of activists' donations?
- shzusnwxbwj 4y ago
- mbostleman 4y ago
  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.
- kcplate 4y ago
  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. Goes both ways of course.

gpt5 4y ago

You could make the same argument about a study that says that meat is good.

GenerocUsername 4y ago
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?
- z9znz 4y ago
  > 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.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    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.
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      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.
      - z9znz 4y ago
        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.
  - surfpel 4y ago
    This comment is ignorant of a lot of things. > 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”?
    - z9znz 4y ago
      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.
  - samatman 4y ago
    > 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.
    - z9znz 4y ago
      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.
      - samatman 4y ago
        It's not a probably. That and your carrying the goalposts with you as you wander about makes this an unproductive conversation to continue.
- brigandish 4y ago
  Or it could be like publishing a paper that says smoking tobacco is harmful and then people cut down their smoking and… become healthier. Like yes you can explain many airway problems with smoking, but does that actually justify not smoking? I hope that helps show that injecting such obvious bias into your examples introduces obvious weaknesses, too.

crims0n 4y ago

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.

ravenstine 4y ago
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” https://academic.oup.com/cdn/article/5/12/nzab133/6415894 https://academic.oup.com/cdn/article/5/12/nzab133/6415894 ^^ 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. Why Humans Eat Meat https://www.history.com/news/why-humans-eat-meat https://www.history.com/news/why-humans-eat-meat For 2 Million Years, Humans Ate Meat And Little Else https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate-meat-and-little-else-study/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-2-million-years-humans-ate... Exceptionally high δ15N values in collagen single amino acids confirm Neandertals as high-trophic level carnivores https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6421459/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6421459/ Stable isotope dietary analysis of the Tianyuan 1 early modern human https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706269/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706269/ Evolutionary basis for the human diet: consequences for human health https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733113/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733113/ Comparative Digestive Physiology https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458075/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458075/
- 4y ago

ravenstine 4y ago

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.

brigandish 4y ago
> 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.

mattgperry 4y ago

The inverse is probably more true, being the animal industry is extraordinarily well funded and established?

z9znz 4y ago

> 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
speeder 4y ago
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.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  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.
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    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.
- shzusnwxbwj 4y ago

samloveshummus 4y ago

Meat is a $2 trillion industry globally but you're primarily worried about the corrupting influence of activists' donations?

shzusnwxbwj 4y ago
mbostleman 4y ago
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.
kcplate 4y ago
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. Goes both ways of course.