Food Studies in General, Meat Studies in Particular

From a reader's comment on the Fitness Spotlight blog (http://www.fitnessspotlight.com/)

 

Studies on meat consumption:

 

These studies are nearly always epidemiological and often poorly designed (plus all the researchers know the subject questionnaires are notoriously inaccurate), and are not intervention studies, they don't prove anything except correlation (which also can correlate to income, education, religion, culture, and other lifestyle variables).

 

Any scientist worth his/her salt knows correlation is not causation. I've yet to see a study that effectively separates meat consumption from sugar, starch, modern vegetable oil consumption, for instance. I've known very few people who eat meat without also eating grains and other starches, without vegetable oils, and without concentrated sugars for even limited periods, let alone for decades or a lifetime.

 

If 95% of meat eaters eat their hormone and antibiotic-laden high omega 6 grain-fed CAFO meat ) mechanically harvested and co-mingled with animals raised in up to 4 countries) with considerable amounts of industrially produced grain products, alongside deep fried in hydrogenated vegetable oil tacos shells, chips, pastry containers or potatoes, all washed down with free-refill HFCS sweetened sodas (or even for contrast, a home cooked meal of supermarket meat, mashed potatos/rice side dish with margarine, canned vegetables, iceberg lettuce and anemic out of season tomato with bottled salad dressing made with soy bean oil, washed down with a big glass of whole milk), how can we, without bias, single out the meat as the problem, especially when the meat is the closest thing to the foods on which we evolved?

 

How can you study a population that has no sizable population for control (not eating the other things)? Seventh Day Adventists? They don't smoke (a biggie), they don't drink alcohol (therefore they don't abuse it), they lead extremely moderate lifestyles probably, and they have a strong religious culture for support. How can we be sure they have healthier members simply because they don't eat meat? Perhaps they'd be even healthier if they didn't eat wheat and vegetable oil…

-- Carl