People who eat get cancer . . . just saying . . . 
Even moderate portions of red meat can cause cancer, study finds
cervyn
(Mame)
#24
The above is what I see as the biggest issue.
Food diaries and food frequency questionnaires are seriously flawed as collection instruments. Subject recall of what foods they ate, how much and when is notoriously poor. You could not pay me enough to do nutritional epi.
Unless your study is supplying all the food to subjects (and perhaps making it impossible for them to add anything else to their intake) your results will be suspect. This is prohibitively expensive and when done is only done for a very short time. As we are interested in long term effects on health and mortality, this type of study tells us nothing useful.
Itās also true that itās easy to āfindā the analysis results you want when you make variable categorical.
Nutritional science is so flawed I feel that the safest route is to take responsibility for your own health and find what works best for you, your health and vitality. However, this takes time and patience and I realize many people (though perhaps not people on this forum) would prefer answers to be given to them for the ease of it.
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#25
The bias in FFQs is not to be ignored. If they made folks keep a month of diet logs, sure. But FFQs require questions like: How often did you eat X, How often did you eat Y? They donāt ask everything, and in this case, they didnāt look at anything related to grain, despite that being 6-12 servings a day in the USDA pyramid and the British equivalent. So, whereās the bread, pasta, rolls, muffins, pastries?
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#26
Breatharians for the win!
ZuleikaD
#27
If they were even that good. Usually itās some horrible question like āOn average, over last year, how many times a week did you eat X?ā First, no one remembers. Second, peopleās math skills are so bad they either canāt average or donāt know what it means or people arenāt sure if theyāre actually being asked to average or just provide a rough guess of ātypically.ā
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#28
Right, thatās one issueā¦ but the bias issue is in what they ask and what they donāt ask. Since they cannot ask everything, there will always be omissions. Since everyone has some bias at the start, how likely they are to design the survey to support the bias is a question of ethics, morals, and belief.
They always ask about processed meat and red meat. The lack of data on grains and carbs is telling in their theory of the crime.
FrankoBear
#29
So why produce a flawed study like this? And the WHO red meat cancer study?
If it is not to help peopleās health and cancer avoidance, why do it?
My understanding is that the WHO study was a vegetarian ethos bias driven study.
Is this one publish or perish survivalist epidemiology for the author? Is the authorās laboratory or institute beholden to donors or sponsors? Did the author get knocked down by a cow?
What is the real reason to publish?
Will the Harvard epidemiologists pop up next in a media headline grab?
I still think it may be correlated with the dietary guidelines review. There are a lot of stakeholders there and most of them are not steak holders.
cervyn
(Mame)
#30
the next? Walter Willett was involved in the recent EAT-Lancet study, I believe he is still at Harvard.
As for why? my cynical side says in the end it all comes down to $ Although I know many who are honestly trying their best to help peopleā¦
djindy
#31
First reason: Because itās their job.
Second reason: Even experts are rarely perfect at their job.
Third Reason: Human nutrition in general is an incredibly difficult field to do serious and definitive scientific studies in, since you canāt experiment on humans the way you can do other things for ethical reasons. Thus, youāll never have a fully controlled, long term, large n, human experiment for this, outside of perhaps an oppressive totalitarian regime that doesnāt mind millions dying (and yes, that has happened a few times in the last century, and people have had to debate whether to use the findings of the horrific studies because of how they were obtained. Donāt recall any being done with nutrition though.)
As a result, yea, we can poke holes in a lot of this stuff, but the standards are already accepted to be lower than, say, simple chemistry where you can a far more controlled experiment 1 million times in exact replication. The chemicals arenāt as likely to complain about being left in their beakers or blowing up.
FrankoBear
#32
In pursuit of the āwhyā, it raises brainstorm points about the researchersā dietary biases and conformity of belief to less than perfect mainstream (observably failed for many) dietary hypotheses and subsequent erroneous extrapolated knowledge.
I seem to remember that Dr Keys did some āexcellentāā¦
ā¦ human work on starvation in 1944/45 in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. 
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#36
Itās worth considering that the SDA folks have a belief that meat, caffeine, and other things make people masturbatory lusty beasts, prone to hot tempers and other acts of ungodliness. Holding these beliefs, they have built a āhealth ministryā to make the world more SDA like, and less meat eaty. There are many ways that they have pushed this health ministry, from Kelloggās grains to studies pushing meat alternatives, influencing dietary guidelines and industryā¦ and so on.
The why is the same why as always. Thereās money. The folks who are trying to help are being fed garbage by the folks who sell the garbage and the folks who are true believers in the evils of onanism (who might be the same folks, really).
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#37
fun with the report and the deeper numbers, hat tip to Nina Teicholz, Zoe Harcombe and others.
1- Red meat was associated with LOWER risk among women (check the appendix of the report).
2- If you look at figure 1 in the report:
You will note that only processed meat achieves significance. The rest are guesses at best.
3- They did not look at buns, breads, pastries, pastas, rices, or any of the things that people typically eat processed meat on or with.
This is biased garbage in, junk stats and science in, and bias confirming āfindingsā on the flip side.
But, if you want to take it to heart, a few less cold cuts and a few more steaks, yo.
DawnOM
(Dawn O Miller)
#40
I believe in following the money. The study was partially funded by LEAP which Iām not clear is pro-vegan but just looking at their website they seem very anti-meat and appear to be funding research towards that end.