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Red Meat Health Observations

Mbaker

Well-Known Member
Messages
4,339
Location
Essex
Type of diabetes
Treatment type
Diet only
Dislikes
Available fast foods in Supermarkets
What is your opinion is the best method of testing Red Meat health, and rate in your order. I have listed a couple of points loosely based around the evidence hierarchy:

1. Food Frequency Questionnaire:
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2021/may/gorging-on-red-meat-is-not-good-for-heart-health.html

Pros
Cheap

Cons:
Recall
Minimal or none carnivore dieters - i.e. is the problem the alcohol, burger, fries, bun etc that came with the meat
Relative risks and other lifestyle confounders

2. Proxy Tested Results:
https://www.virtahealth.com/outcomes

Pros
Meat eaters are the majority population. So if this cohort and similar get better then.....

Cons:
Not exclusively meat eating, quantities of red meat not known

3. Anecdotes:
https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/

4. Ancestral / History:

Pros:
Some populations still alive

Cons:
Some tribes are getting some modern foods also

5. Randomised Trial:

Pros:
Can carry weight of efficacy

Cons:
Definitions. E.g. low carb 130 grams
Foods: use of veg oils or versions of Keto, Keto people would not do

So for me the order is:

1. Ancestral / History
I believe this is trumps everything as it encompasses common sense e.g, Obesity rate in UK in 1970 was 2%, raises the question what changed significantly or the most - veg oil and derivative products.

2. Anecdotes
In significant numbers these are hypothesis generating and when backed by medical records backing the results are powerful evidence. These can often disprove an hypothesis, e.g. meat causes: diabetes, hypertension - how can both reversal and causation both be true at the same time.

3. Proxy Tested Results
These often show results that disprove another hypothesis e.g. Women's Health Initiative study, Mr FIT study and Minnesota coronary experiment 1968-73. In the case of Virta Health, there study confounded many "accepted" facts.

4. Randomised Trial
These can be setup to show what is required. E.g. a study of "meat eaters" vs "dash diet". If the meat eaters were Josephine and Joe blogs from Somewhere world vs dash diet eaters who were 4 times a week gym goers who do not drink - you would get outcome 1; if the meat eaters were several I could pick out from this website who have put their Type 2 into remission you would get outcome 2.

5. Food Frequency Questionnaires
Where to start with these. People from a computer / engineering background cannot abide by this type of science, due to if those same methods were being used in our fields, computer systems would get more viruses, every other plane would fall out of the sky etc. Most of us are in absolute results industries, where relative results are not acceptable or useable, and "misleading" is definitely off of the table.

Over to you, your thoughts
 
The quality of evidence usually ranks RCTs and meta analysis of the same as top of the evidence tree. They are evidently very difficult to run because they are expensive and can't be done 'blind' nor be done over the period of time it takes to develop chronic illness.

Food frequency questionnaires are just the tools of the observational study which looks forward or backwards at one cohort of people. Those studies are frequently confounded by the 'Gwyneth Paltrow; effect i.e. healthy people do plenty of healthy things as well as NOT eating meat (non smoking, yoga practice, living in California etc.) - see also The Mormons in Lomalinda CA . The converse is true - that those who truly don't care about dietary advice might be eating red meat in a burger but they're also eating plenty of vegetable oils too and not much salad.

The ancestral health idea does makes sense but isn't as reliable as an RCT because we don't really know what our ancestors ate. We do know they ate a wide range of diets with varying amounts of meat/fish and grains/tubers. The unifying factor seems to be lack of processed foods and very little sugars (fruit in season and honey).

Like those observational studies based on food frequency questionnaires either side can cherry pick their hunter gatherers of choice to make the point for or against red meat. If you like keto you'd go for Kalahari bush men and Eskimos. If you are anti red meat choose Mormons or the Okinawans (though as it turns out they ate quite a lot of pork) or others in the 'Blue Zones'. The only eating pattern not supported by the ancestral health evidence is veganism. I agree with your concerns about the questionnaires being unverifiable!

Interesting question though and I agree that it is worth asking how evidence is gathered in food science!
We do need better reasons than we've been given to stop eating meat especially if you've got metabolic disease.
 
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The golden rule for balance in diet.
Too much of anything is bad for you, especially healthy or complex carbs.
Too little of certain low carb foods is not good for you.
You need protein and fats, and veg but you don't need carbs

Then, it is the individual tastes, ethnicity, availability, cost, and religious beliefs.
 
NicoleC1971 said:
The unifying factor seems to be lack of processed foods and very little sugars (fruit in season and honey).
Click to expand...

Curious about the idea of "fruit in season". All fruit has it's season, and each season has it's particular fruits, right? So isn't this more a case of variability of availability, rather than entire periods of time when there would've been no fruit?

NicoleC1971 said:
The only eating pattern not supported by the ancestral health evidence is veganism.
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Not sure I'd agree. Veganism would absolutely not have been practiced, at any point in our evolution. It is a human construct, but so is ketosis-in-perpetuity and the carnivore diet. It is only our current abilities to secure seemingly-limitless refrigerated calories, within very short distances of our abodes that makes any of these possible. In a survival/evolutionary context we'd have eaten whatever we could gather or kill.
 
Beating-My-Betes said:
Curious about the idea of "fruit in season". All fruit has it's season, and each season has it's particular fruits, right? So isn't this more a case of variability of availability, rather than entire periods of time when there would've been no fruit?
Click to expand...

Probably depends where you live.
 
Goonergal said:
Probably depends where you live.
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No doubt. In the UK, it seems that the only months not really well served are January to March, but even the there are apples. Further North, it seems that Scandinavian countries have less variety, but apples seem to be year-round, with the exception of a few months in the Summer.
 

In the UK apples are harvested when ripe in September.
Used to work on a large fruit farm when at uni and it was the last job before the start of the before Christmas term.
Now we store them at chilled temps for months friends dad owned a large fruit farm.
If you simply leave them on the tree they rot so the season for UK apples is about a month max.
 
No refrigerator storage has been around for centuries. Stored not touching in a dry barn or similar, with some ventilation, they can last months.
 
I'd agree that we will do what we need to do to survive but going on the basis of those that did survive to produce future generations there are no vegans possibly because they require supplementation and perhaps this meant in t he past they couldn't have successful pregnancies being deficient in iron and B12 for example.
Keto doesn't require supplementation and there are still hunter gatherers who eat t this way without access to supplements. I agree that those peoples might well have eaten grains had they been able to not having the luxury of choosing to only eat m
As for the fruit I live in the UK and there's apples, pears . plums and berries in late Summer/Autumn I think. Back in the days before agriculture those fruits would have been pretty small and bitter too.
 
bulkbiker said:
Is it?
North Europe through the Ice Age would have been pretty devoid of vegetation?
Click to expand...

To re-state: I referred to ketosis "in perpetuity". By that, I mean consistently, over multiple generations (from inception to grave) and even when there are alternative sources of fuel available, Ketosis, in the sense you seem to be alluding to is exactly the type of crisis situation ketosis developed to counter. But in the context of this thread i.e health (and I presume longevity) I'm not sure that just about surviving long enough to sire our progeny (And of course, many would not have) is necessarily grounds for health and longevity.

Here are some interesting presentations on the ice age:


 

Interesting! Still leaves three other seasons.
 
lucylocket61 said:
No refrigerator storage has been around for centuries. Stored not touching in a dry barn or similar, with some ventilation, they can last months.
Click to expand...
Agree but the last ice age was thousands of years ago.
Hunter gatherers would eat fruit in season to fatten up for winter if it were available.
 
bulkbiker said:
Possibly but very debatable.
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Probably have to wait for Tim Spectre to stop jumping on the Covid band waggon to get an answer on that!
I imagine that in the context of a bad diet/too many antibiotics etc. there's more need to re feed the gut than if you're eating pure carnivore perhaps.
 
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