>It’s very clear that the more meat you eat, the earlier you die. Cut out as much meat as you can.
Absolute nonsense. The only thing that has a clear relationship with extending lifespan is calorie restriction. The rest is very very unclear.
This guy finds a population, finds one thing they do that supports his preconceived notions of what makes you live longer, and then says that this population's behavior in this respect proves that this action makes you live longer.
So he finds a vegetarian culture that lives long and says OK vegetarianism makes you live longer. He finds a culture that drinks a lot of alcohol and says OK, alcohol doesn't limit longevity.
He finds a culture that eats a balanced diet, a culture that exercises a lot, etc. etc.
None if this is really any type of proof, and if you examine many different cultures, you will find his evidence is contradicted by other cultures (meat eating cultures that live longer and have fewer health problems than nearby vegetarian cultures, for instance).
Our knowledge of what helps humans to live the longest possible life is, sadly, very limited still.
The guy is as close to an expert in this field as it gets right now. If he says lots of meat is bad, I tend to believe him. One day we'll know exactly how and why, but right now I trust him.
And a bit of speculation: lots of heavy metals accumulate up the food chain. If you eat an onion, that's one onion's worth of heavy metals extracted from the ground. But if you eat a chicken leg, it's a few kilograms worth of plant that accumulated in it. And when you feed them animal protein it concentrates even further. Over a lifetime it's probably a difference of an order of magnitude between a meat-eater and a vegetarian.
And what do we mean by meat? I'm sure toxin filled fish effects you differently from fresh. Or grass-fed (natural diet) chicken is different nutritionally than industrial chicken.
zngtk4 is basically saying that nutrition science is sampling at too low at resolution to make definitive claims, I buy that.
How many times can you flip-flop on eggs until we stop listening? Obviously they're something else going on. The argument that they're generally "bad" is too low rez. Not to mention how we were told to eat margarine over butter for 50+ years, and it turned out to be one of the worse things to consume.
And what do we mean by vegetarian? There's got to be a massive difference between living on bread, potato, cake and nut-roast and living on salad, fruit and steamed greens. "Not eating meat" really doesn't say much about what you do eat.
Raw foodists claim there's a lot of denaturing and damage done to proteins, enzymes and more when food is cooked. There are differences in composition between food that is cooked until done and food that is cooked until blackened (e.g. on a barbecue). Some claim there is measurable damage done when food is blended compared to chopped or juiced 'gently'. There is lots of skepticism about microwave cooking versus traditional ovens. As well as eggs, popular advice zig-zags on soy and types of fats. So...
>> zngtk4 is basically saying that nutrition science is sampling at too low at resolution to make definitive claims, I buy that.
there are many peer reviewed and exhaustive studies that show that meat consumption is related to a shorter life. check out the china study for starters.
There are zero controlled studies showing this, however, and all of these studies are epidemiological/observational. It's confounded by things such as the fact that many of the groups that are vegetarian also essentially engage in calorie restriction (which has been shown in controlled animal studies to work). Meat eating, however, hasn't even been shown in animal studies to necessarily be bad, because it entirely depends on the animal (feed meat to a rabbit, bad things happen, feed grains to a cat, bad things happen). Cultures that engage in significant meat eating also tend to eat a lot of sugar, trans-fats, and other things. These studies are far from conclusive as a result.
Observational studies that are peer reviewed and exhaustive can yield results that are entirely opposite reality. Dozens of peer reviewed, exhaustive observational studies told doctors that hormone replacement therapy reduced the incidence of heart attacks. Only after 16,000 women were enrolled in a double-blind controlled trial of hormone-replacement therapy in the 90s (after 6 million women had received the therapy) did we learn that heart disease, breast cancer, stroke, and dementia actually were more common in people receiving hormone replacement therapy vs placebo. In other words, the exact opposite.
Epidemiology is only of value in formulating hypotheses, not in proving anything.
"Dozens of peer reviewed, exhaustive observational studies told doctors that hormone replacement therapy reduced the incidence of heart attacks. "
Then they weren't exhaustive were they? Virtually nothing is proven ever. In fact, nothing is absolute except abstract mathematics. When there are numerous studies showing a correlation then we can feel somewhat confident in it. When we then look at disease rates in societies that do not eat me and see a clear correlation between meat eating and heart disease then we can feel even more confident.
Also remember that in the china study the group that got more disease (and ate more meat) got roughly the same amount of exercise and had roughly the same lifestyle. This isn't absolute proof, but nothing is every absolutely proven. I always find it fascinating that there is such a knee jerk reaction to this issue.
My "knee jerk reaction" is simply that there isn't enough evidence to provide real nutritional guidance. The types of studies that need to be done have not been done.
And the fact is, there are not numerous studies consistently showing a correlation, there are many studies that do not show that those who eat more meat get more disease. For example, Cretan villagers have lower heart-disease rates than even the Japanese and eat diets consisting of 40% fat. The "French Paradox" is so termed because the French eat high quantities of animal fat but have low heart disease. Tokelauan's, who had a diet high in fat (50% fat) and saturated fat (90% of the fat they ate was saturated), were relatively healthy. After migrating they consumed much less fat and had higher heart disease.
In other words, there's a lot about diet we don't understand yet and you can't boost the relevance of epidemiological studies by saying that "virtually nothing is proven ever" and therefore we should just accept observational science, when it's known that epidemiology has significant flaws as anything other than a hypothesis generator.
the cretan diet is low in meat and the fat mainly comes from olive oil. This is an example that supports the correlation with meat and heart disease.
Now onto the french paradox. First, you again are conflating fat with meat. They aren't the same so at this point you seem to be pushing an agenda through bait and switch.
"French people get up to 80% of their fat intake from dairy and vegetable sources ... The principal aspects of this diet include high olive oil consumption".
There is plenty of evidence and there are some outliers. Using outliers to claim that the abundance of evidence doesn't exist is disingenuous. Also, the american diet is terrible for other reasons such as the high consumption of highly processed foods. One can certainly find people that eat a lot of meat, but little processed food, and show that it's a healthier diet compared to one of highly processed foods. This doesn't mean that a diet low in meat and processed food isn't healthier, and in fact we there is a good deal of evidence showing that it is.
Which animal studies prove that eating meat will decrease longevity in humans? Sure, if you feed meat to rabbits, or other vegetarian animals, but there are just as many animals that are essentially incapable of eating not only grains but even vegetables.
They used omnivorous animals. Yes it's not concrete proof that it will translate to humans but if you take all the evidence together - the animal trials, the cellular-level experiments and the observations in humans - it's enough to convince the author of The China Study. And more importantly it convinced me.
And which type of omnivorous animals? And which type of fat?
Saturated fat has little effect on rats, but polyunsaturated fat induces tumors in rats according to to many studies. Low-fat, high calorie diets lead to more tumors than high-fat, low calorie diets in rats (in fact the high-fat, low calorie diets essentially stopped tumor production entirely). This latter was a major study in the journal Cancer Research. Only in high calorie diets was high-fat worse than low-fat, and in low calorie diets, high-fat was better than low-fat.
Atherosclerosis is often observed in pigs, cats, dogs, sheep, cows, horses, reptiles, rats, and baboons when fed exclusively vegetarian diets.
Monkeys in captivity often become fat and diabetic on high-fiber, low-fat, no-cholesterol diets.
It's entirely possible that a no-meat diet is best for humans, but I don't think we're anywhere near the understanding needed to say this -- and his recommendation to avoid fish as well would be viewed as dangerous by much of the medical and scientific community. What we really need are controlled studies, which are entirely possible to do.
You continue to conflate fat and meat and then make points implying that meat consumption is fine.
I don't see how controlled studies are possible for various reasons. For starters there are far to many variables and we have no idea how they interrelate. Second, we can't control humans to the degree that would be needed to truly isolate a single variable (which I don't think would be too useful anyway) and animal studies are always imperfect. I'm convinced that diet studies are most effective when performed at a higher level of abstraction.
OK, educate: I don’t want to die at 50. What do I do?
The first step is to think about who you hang out with.
There’s no silver bullet for longevity. I’m not gonna tell you to take a pill. If your three best friends are obese, there’s a good chance you will be. Surrounding yourself with people who don’t smoke or drink too much and who have a spiritual component in their lives has a profound impact over time. Cut out the toxic people in your life and spend time and effort augmenting your social circle with people who have the right values and a healthy lifestyle.
I don't know why, but this snippet brought Robert Greene's The 48 Rules of Power to mind: "Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky" (Rule 10). Of course, Greene's approach can be interpreted as a tad Machiavellian. But the message is still the same: watch who you're hanging out with. I've noticed that many of one's peculiar behavioral habits can be directly attributed to friends and acquaintances. It's interesting to see longevity talked about in the context of the people you spend time with.
Live a healthy lifestyle, consume less, push your body to function efficiently and you will be more likely to live longer. You might still die in a car accident but it makes sense that changes in day to day behavior affect how your cells regenerate.
By your reasoning, all this stuff about climate change is just blah blah blah. Correlations seen numerous times in independent efforts are meaningful.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "controlled". For example, in the china study the group that ate more meat was compared to a similar group in the same country with the same lifestyle. Isn't this the definition of a control group?
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "controlled".
Obviously not. You just offered the definition of uncontrolled.
> climate change is just blah
Well he makes a pretty good point that data dredging for correlations is bad science. But the real reason climate change is "blah" is that the world isn't actually warming. Clearly shown for over ten years now by satellite and ground station data. There was only warming after a long cooling trend that lasted into the 70s.
Re: all the deficiencies of this article: It's journalism(-ish). Not even science journalism. The NG heading says it all: "Adventure Travel - National Geographic Adventure Magazine" ...not even the main NG site, but the "adventure" subdomain.
On the other hand, as I explain above, epidemiological studies are essentially useless for anything other than formulating hypotheses (see the debacle with hormone replacement therapy).
It baffles me that anyone would entirely change their diet and lifestyle based on an epidemiological study.
The evidence is not just from the epidemiological study, there have been lots of follow-up studies to examine the processes in detail.
I would argue that a broad, epidemiological study is the most persuasive sort of evidence to use when considering whether to make drastic changes. Otherwise you're dealing with information like "omega 3s prevent x, y, and z" so you end up taking an Omega 3 supplement along with the dozen other supplements while eating Wendy's for lunch every day.
Thinking that health can be understood on the basis of "taking supplement x is good" is the root of the current supplement gold rush (people sell tons of snake oil substances that contain "omega 3's" etc.) and a highly irrational way to behave.
>follow-up studies to examine the processes in detail.
Examining the processes isn't sufficient to provide proof unless it's a completely thorough examination. Biological science isn't at that point yet, and so what this usually means is that group A performs an observational study, group B finds a process that would explain group A's results, assuming group A's results are true. That's different from showing that group A's results were true.
Human, and animal, physiology is very complicated, and it's just plain wrong to assert that we know that eating meat decreases longevity. We don't. There is some evidence to believe it, and some evidence to not believe it at this point (both epidemiological studies and at the molecular understanding of the processes involved).
Epidemiological may be persuasive, but it's misleading because you take a single variable out of hundreds that may not even be known. So you may get Texans who become vegetarians based on longevity studies in some region of China, but then live an even shorter life because their lifestyles and the particular vegetarian foods that they eat aren't as conducive to longevity. This history of epidemiological studies are full of cases like this.
I don't dispute your logical points, but I think there is still a rather strong case for eating a plant-based diet.
Clearly, humans can eat meat (during most of human evolution calories were scarce and eating meat conferred a selection advantage)...
But why would you reason that all foods are equally beneficial and harmful? To me, broad epidemiological studies can offer clues on classes of foods and some of the costs/benefits that they confer.
I'm not reasoning that all foods are equally beneficial and harmful, and I accept that it may very well be that a plant-based diet is superior to a meat-based diet. I reject the idea, however, that we know enough to say that this is true, and I absolutely reject the idea of significantly changing behavior based solely on epidemiological studies -- the epidemiological studies should be the starting point for much further study. To date, most large-scale controlled studies on diet have unfortunately been shelved. It should entirely be possible to separate multiple groups on multiple different diets and see what happens over a period of, say, ten years -- one diet as vegetarian, one diet as meat/fruit/nut but no grains, a fish+vegetarian diet, while holding other variables constant (such as calories). This is what we need to do to know, and this is what has consistently been proposed, but not done.
However the study that you call for has been done in laboratory animals -- TCC found that (controlling for calories, etc.) the animal proteins he studied led to the growth of cancer cells, while plant based foods did not cause cancer to develop, even in an environment of radiation, etc., that would typically be thought to be the cause of the cancer.
I fully agree that the study you mention would be hugely beneficial, but by your logic one ought to smoke cigarettes if one chooses, or at least ought to have done so in the 1980s before more conclusive evidence began to emerge... even though most doctors/scientists had held a strong belief that smoking was a bad idea for decades.
If one were to base all of his health decisions on studies that were conclusively done in humans (without regard for any animal studies, etc.) one would be limited to a 1950s understanding. Humans are not mice, and the studies don't all correlate perfectly, but many do. And they contain valuable (though not necessarily conclusive) information.
Absolutely, and the observations suggested that hormone treatment was possibly even beneficial. That's why it's completely true that correlation != causation. You can try to "control" for differences in the observed groups, and epidemiologists try this all the time, but unless they already understand everything involved, it's impossible to get this completely right. And sometimes the things they try to control for are themselves based on other epidemiological studies.
This is the main reason we are always hearing in the press about how a "study shows that X is bad for us" then a "study shows that X is good for us". The majority of the time when there are such conflicting studies, it is the result of epidemiology or poorly controlled studies.
So there was some other factor that by chance made the hormones benefitial for the women in the study? Or all the women somehow where more healthy than "normal" women to begin with? How does that happen? And how could one control for it, wouldn't you need thousands of identical twins?
I suppose so, if you consider some random people's blogs authoritative. I thought this was HN and not Reddit :)
These are blogs written by people who are promoting a high cholesterol diet -- hmm, ever notice that there is lots of money in promoting nutrition advice that confirms to what people are currently already doing?
The china study book is just "some dude's book." It is not peer reviewed. Some of the underlying study is, but most of the conclusions expressed in the book are not a product of peer review.
The "China study" referred to in the title is the China Project, a study comparing diet, lifestyle and disease chacteristics in sixty five counties in rural China in the 1970's and 1980's conducted jointly by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. has been at the forefront of nutrition research. His legacy, the China Study, is the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr. Campbell is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and Project Director of the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project.
Dr. Campbell received his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Cornell, and served as a Research Associate at MIT. He spent 10 years on the faculty of Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition before returning to the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell in 1975 where he presently holds his Endowed Chair (now Emeritus).
Did you miss the part where he blatantly misrepresents research? The writer irrelevant. Utter your soothing "well respected scientist" mantra all you want. You can look at the abstracts yourself that show campbell's misrepresentations.
Yes I did. Campbell did not misrepresent anything; abstracts are highly condensed summations written by someone else who may or may not have the background necessary to fully convey the underlying research.
Poorly written abstracts are the leading cause of sensationalist headlines.
Isn't this article about correlation?
Isn't the point of the article that something about eating less meat (whether it's lifestyle, actual dietary effects, or something innocuous) correlates, whether or not there is a causal relationship*, to significantly increased longevity?
If there is no direct causal link then all correlation does is suggest such a link. You have to FIND the link and prove its real in order to make this about something.
X is observed in people doing Y is not a scientific breakthrough, it is an observation. If not all people that do Y have X there is no story, just more work to get to the bottom of what is going on.
Then why have lifespans gone up and heart disease declined all around the world in lockstep with animal protein consumption? Why do the two longest lived groups in the US (Mormons and upper upper Midwest whites) have high meat consumption?
Loma Linda is the only blue zone in the USA, and it is dominated by adventists who are predominately vegetarian. The ones that are not are restricted on what types of meat they can eat (by the religion -- the list is in leviticus).
from the source:
-----
The people inhabiting Blue Zones share common lifestyle characteristics that contribute to their longevity. Among the lifestyle characteristics shared among the Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda Blue Zones are the following:[4]
Family - Family is put ahead of other concerns.
No Smoking - Centenarians do not typically smoke.
Plant-Based Diet - The majority of food consumed is derived from plants.
Constant Moderate Physical Activity - Moderate physical activity is an inseparable part of life.
Social Engagement - People of all ages are socially active and integrated into their communities.
<shrug> that's not the point. The whole discussion was a bunch of people saying "No, I'm right!". A source is at the very least the beginning of intelligent conversation.
Improved medical knowledge and technology? Better access to hospitals and doctors? Lots of things have changed in the past century. It's just as well to say that lifespans have gone up and heart disease has declined with the spread of telephone service or the emergence of plastic bags.
Heart disease has also increased with sugar consumption. Older cultures that ate primarily meat, but not a western diet also showed almost no heart disease.
I agree, this is one of the biggest flaws with this line of reasoning. However, it does say something (although it's unclear what it means for us) that some of those cultures had less incidence of the diseases commonly associated with old age compared with nearby similar cultures that ate less or no meat.
If by decline, you mean "ironically increased in occurrence until it has become the number one killer of men and women", then yes, it's declined dramatically.
However, the problem isn't meat eating; it's the quantity and fat content of meat that is eaten. Eating moderate amounts of beef, chicken, etc, is associated with longer life and healthier hearts, but eating too much is associated with heart disease.
I don't like the way he refers to "Premature CHD Mortality" as if having CHD which kills you at an older age can be dismissed from consideration.
He also doesn't mention that another thing the groups all have in common is being alive at the same time - if treatment for symptoms improved, all ages would benefit, e.g. with the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain, starting with legislation in 1948 and presumably taking a few years to ramp up to nationwide usefulness.
The same trend exists in the entire post war industrialized world, including Japan. Heart disease deaths declined as people got more affluent. Most likely because they could afford to eat better food and more meat and dairy.
The assertion that eating less meat reduces heart disease is absurd in the face of the fact that heart disease has declined all around the world while meat consumption has gone up.
Your link is about death rates, not heart disease rates. Can you give me some graphs of heart disease rates over time with sources? There are plenty of studies which show that societies that eat more meat have higher rates of heart disease. I have yet to see a study showing the opposite which is why I said it's absurd.
I also read some more of the "articles" on that site you linked to and they were absurd on their face. Here is one example. They are attempting to refute the claim that animal farming is an efficient use of land.
"Much of the land used for animal farming, cannot be used for arable farming. With a rapidly expanding world population, a large proportion of whom are already starving, how can taking this land out of production help?"
This completely ignores the fact that large percentages of our corn and soy farming is used to feed animals. Ignoring this single data point either makes them ignorant or dishonest.
Much of the land used to grow corn and soy should rightly be used to graze animals. It is only used to grow plants because of federal subsidies. Remove the subsidies and special water rights, and it would revert to grass lands best used for sheep and cattle.
I'd go google up the data about heart disease declining in Japan and continental Europe in the post-war era, but I get the impression you're blind to facts.
It's fascinating that you refused to give data in your past two posts.
Regarding land, if we used the land used to grow animal feed to grow plants for human consumption we'd get a lot more food. This is clearly more efficient, yet the page you linked to tries to claim the opposite by ignoring facts and building logic on that false basis.
Animal feed is only grown on this land because it is subsidized. Growing plants on it is economically inefficient. If agriculture in the US were unsubsidized, nobody would try to grow plants on this land. It would be grasslands. And the only human use for the land would be to graze animals on it.
that's only true for a subset. I grew up in an area that had a lot of vegetable farming for 200 years or so, naturally and a wide variety, and it was replaced by soy farming due to the retarded policies we currently have in place. Anyway you cut it, growing primarily plants for food is far more efficient than meat production.
I agree with you about the current absurdity of our system.
> growing primarily plants for food is far more efficient than meat production.
Dairy cows and egg laying chickens and farmed catfish are much more efficient at turning vegetable matter into complete proteins than humans. If you accept the premise that humans need almost a gram of complete protein per kg of body mass per day, animal production is more efficient and quite necessary.
Absolute nonsense. The only thing that has a clear relationship with extending lifespan is calorie restriction. The rest is very very unclear.
This guy finds a population, finds one thing they do that supports his preconceived notions of what makes you live longer, and then says that this population's behavior in this respect proves that this action makes you live longer.
So he finds a vegetarian culture that lives long and says OK vegetarianism makes you live longer. He finds a culture that drinks a lot of alcohol and says OK, alcohol doesn't limit longevity.
He finds a culture that eats a balanced diet, a culture that exercises a lot, etc. etc.
None if this is really any type of proof, and if you examine many different cultures, you will find his evidence is contradicted by other cultures (meat eating cultures that live longer and have fewer health problems than nearby vegetarian cultures, for instance).
Our knowledge of what helps humans to live the longest possible life is, sadly, very limited still.