Quitting red meat for good

[kray]

After reading about how red meat affects those with IBS and the heart, I’m officially announcing that I’m done with red meat forever. I will see what happens in a few months, how changes my health and IBS condition, and report on that then. For now I’m in need of a cleanse 

[kag101]

do you like eating red meat?

[kray]

49 minutes ago, kag101 said:

do you like eating red meat?

I like a nice steak here and there, but recently I've red meat wayyy too often, like a few times a week. That's a bit much

[Stovo]

I'm not entirely convinced the research on red meat is correct. Red meat has been a staple of human diets since the invention of fire, it doesn't make sense that it would be unhealthy when we're literally evolved to eat it. 

[kray]

4 hours ago, Stovo said:

I'm not entirely convinced the research on red meat is correct. Red meat has been a staple of human diets since the invention of fire, it doesn't make sense that it would be unhealthy when we're literally evolved to eat it. 

Yea but think humans during the invention of fire, they were living off the land. The average human today is no where near as fit as the average human a few hundreds of thousands of years ago. With the sedentary lifestyle most of us live these days, red meat just adds unnecessary pressure on the arteries. Unless you are a body builder, or amazingly athletic, I don't see a reason for how what you said still sticks today. But then again I'm not telling anyone to stop eating red meat, I'm just stopping red meat for my own health reasons.  

[Stovo]

@kray It could also be possible that our changed diets have contributed to us being less fit, ie more nutritionless grains and less high nutritional red meat. 

I have 2 critiques of red meat studies, 1) they always group it with processed meats, and 2) they don't take into account that most people cook red meat with seed oils which are terrible for you. 

[RendHeaven]

1 hour ago, Stovo said:

@kray It could also be possible that our changed diets have contributed to us being less fit, ie more nutritionless grains and less high nutritional red meat. 

I have 2 critiques of red meat studies, 1) they always group it with processed meats, and 2) they don't take into account that most people cook red meat with seed oils which are terrible for you. 

There we go.

Someone who's properly studied

I salute you brother.

[King Merk]

I’m interested to hear how these changes impact you.

I for example eat 100% red meat. I do carnivore and only consume organic grass fed beef. Never felt better.

[kray]

21 minutes ago, King Merk said:

I’m interested to hear how these changes impact you.

I for example eat 100% red meat. I do carnivore and only consume organic grass fed beef. Never felt better.

i will give an update in about a month, for me it’s about my IBS condition as red meat is typically considered high risk and can lead to higher risk of ulcers

[King Merk]

@kray I know multiple people that have cured their IBS with a carnivore approach. If this doesn’t work for you then that could always be the next thing to look into

Hope you find some relief soon! 

[Stovo]

@Michael569 A lot of the research has their own agenda, especially when it comes from the WHO. It's convenient if red meat is deemed to be bad for you because then pasture land can be converted to more calorie dense grains, at the expense of nutrition. You only need to look at the nutritional content of red meat, and the knowledge that humans have eaten it for hundreds of thousands of years, to know it's really good for you. 

Seed oils are literally industrial oils that humans are not evolved to digest properly. Their increased use during the 20th century coincided with the worsening health of the western world.

Saturated fats are not bad for you if you limit the portions, it's actually the seed oils that the foods are cooked in or added as an ingredient. 

 

[thenondualtankie]

@Michael569

2 hours ago, Michael569 said:

2) Why do you think seed oils are bad? People who consume more unsaturated fats (in replacement for saturates) have better health outcomes. This has also been pretty persuasively demonstrated now. Seed oils are not the problem here. The ApoB containing  lipoproteins triggering early onset of intraarterial inflammation (found in foods like beef and butter) are the real problem. And smothering your steak in butter is probably trippling the risk of adverse health outcomes  

Hasn't the whole 'saturated fats are bad' thing been debunked?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20071648/

"Conclusions: A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat."

[Stovo]

1 hour ago, Michael569 said:

How do you know that ancestral foods are superior just because we evolved on them? Evolution does not care about longevity. Having "evolved" means having reached a reproductive peak window without dying. Longevity and reproductive fitness are two completely different things. I am not an expert on this topic but I'd highly highly recommend giving this a listen. This was a beautiful debate on why the appeal to nature is a poor argument in this case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8p39Gwct1Y&ab_channel=TheNutrivore Of course totally cool if you choose not to

The increased disease incidence is probably linked to reduced infant mortality and improvement in longevity due to medical advancement. The longer people live, the more disease you will see....well because if people die prematurely, they get less sick with chronic disease because they do not make it to that age when these problems would start to occur. 

Listened to that podcast but it seemed like the pro meat guy was just really poor at debating compared to the other guy which made his arguments seem weak ?

I think what really matters is what personally feels good for you since we're all genetically different. For me I feel really good eating a lot of meat, fish, and liver. Others prefer a vegetarian diet like Sadhguru, others prefer a vegan diet. 

I still wouldn't recommend a vegan diet for most people though. 

[undeather]

1 hour ago, Stovo said:

@Michael569 A lot of the research has their own agenda, especially when it comes from the WHO. It's convenient if red meat is deemed to be bad for you because then pasture land can be converted to more calorie dense grains, at the expense of nutrition. You only need to look at the nutritional content of red meat, and the knowledge that humans have eaten it for hundreds of thousands of years, to know it's really good for you. 

Seed oils are literally industrial oils that humans are not evolved to digest properly. Their increased use during the 20th century coincided with the worsening health of the western world.

Saturated fats are not bad for you if you limit the portions, it's actually the seed oils that the foods are cooked in or added as an ingredient. 

 

Let's be very careful with our assumptions here.

The WHO, as a public health agency, doesnt really conduct high quality nutritional research on their own. They analyze data - yes, they base their recommendations on said data - yes, but the heavy lifting is done by various teams of scientists and other experts who are largely indepedent of certain outcome pressures. In fact, the worst thing that can happen to you as a scientist is to get exposed for manipulating the data - this will immediatly end your academic career and thats of course, not in the interest of many. 

If we talk about bias & agenda in nutritional reserach - then the first name you have to call out is the one with the monetary interest: industry. And yes, industry sponsored trials are more than 4 times as likely to report a positive outcome than unsponsered ones. At the very front, the usual suspect: meat & dairy. The are some really crazy examples of what they are doing to screw with the data and its a growing problem in our information landscape. Plant based reserach with absurd health claims are on the rise as well, especially since it has became trendy in the west.

To say that something is "good for you" because we have eaten it for hundreds of thousands of years is problematic. This is not how evolutionary health works, since once you procreate, survivability only becomes an issue for the individual. The only thing that nature cares about is that you put a descendant on the earth, so everything that gives you this advantage over others, will select itself through the evolutonary mechanism. Now red meat is associated with all sorts of parametres that, in a tribal - pre agricultural setting, will benefit you for exactly those reasons. It wont tell you anything about how to live a long and healthy life, especially in our modern context. 

Our digestive system is perfectly ready to deal with seed oils since its mostly concentrated fatty acids and our body knows exactly what those are. There is an argument to be made about oils, but it has nothing to do with this evolutionary crap. The supposed negative health affects of cooking oils usually come from byproducts during the manufacturing process. That's why its smart to stick to cold pressed, high quality ones with high antioxidant content. I know this increase of mortality during the 20th century gets thrown around a lot in the youtube broscience-sphere, but there are at least 10 better hypothesis for this finding than the evil oil. 

Saturated fat does, without a doubt, influence ApoB-containing lipoproteins and its just overwhelmingly clear that those are casually to blame for arterioscletoric disease progression. I know its an unpopular opinion for many youtubers and pseudo-doctors, but the evidence is just mounting over them at this point. You can not deny this and they still trying to sell the audience for silly. 

1 hour ago, thenondualtankie said:

@Michael569

Hasn't the whole 'saturated fats are bad' thing been debunked?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20071648/

"Conclusions: A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat."

Risk of heart disease is reduced when dietary saturated fats are replaced appropriately. This is also the case when replacing meat and dairy foods. polyunsaturated fats (−25%), monounsaturated fats (−15%), and to a lesser extent carbohydrates from whole grains (−9%), were all associated with reduced CHD risk when isocalorically substituted for dietary saturated fat.

Reducing saturated fatty acid intake to less than 10% of energy may have additional benefits.405 However, the LDL-C-lowering effect of substituting polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) for saturated fatty acids may be less in obese (5.3%) than in normal-weight persons (9.7%).

There is a huge amount of evidence that supports this evidence and citing one meta-analysis which has heavily criticized wont change that. 

 

 

Edited August 1, 2022 by undeather

[Scholar]

4 hours ago, Michael569 said:

If you look at most meta-analyses on the intake of red meat they nearly always  include a split between regular and processed where they are looking at individual differences. What you see most of the time is that while processed meat is worse, yes. The beef itself is pretty much unanimously associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer. Here is the most robust monograph published on the topic to date. This is not a blog of some low carb lunatic. These are robust clinical guidelines prepared by WHO's collaboration with IARC. This is the deepest analysis of the data possible. 

https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-redmeat/

"A meta-analysis including data from 10 cohort studies reported a statistically significant dose–response association between consumption of red meat and/or processed meat and cancer of the colorectum. The relative risks of cancer of the colorectum were 1.17 (95% CI, 1.05–1.31) for an increase in consumption of red meat of 100 g/day and 1.18 (95% CI, 1.10–1.28) for an increase in consumption of processed meat of 50 g/day"  - this is a nice demonstration of how processed beef is very bad but regular is equally harmful, you just need slightly bigger portions. For every 100g eaten per day the risk of CC is increased by 18%. This translates to about a 4-6 mouthfuls of steak. 

2) Why do you think seed oils are bad? People who consume more unsaturated fats (in replacement for saturates) have better health outcomes. This has also been pretty persuasively demonstrated now. Seed oils are not the problem here. The ApoB containing  lipoproteins triggering early onset of intraarterial inflammation (found in foods like beef and butter) are the real problem. And smothering your steak in butter is probably trippling the risk of adverse health outcomes  

I feel like there is a systemic problem where we keep discussing this nonsense. It's a waste of everyones time, we need to have some sort of resource that can immediately refer people to all this reasoning, otherwise we just have to keep educating the garbage out of people's minds. It's a sisyphean task. And most of the time reasonable people aren't around here to point out all the misinformation people spread.

 

Maybe time would be better spent working with Leo on some solution here, educating him and then simply referring people to the proper ressources when they spread misinformation. We have been going in circles and circles for years on this topic now.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Scholar

[Stovo]

@undeather Your trust in institutions and science is strong I see, I understand I have been there. 

Consider 1) funding flows for science, and 2) scientists own self biases

The evidence that red meat is good for you is not only the fact our ancestors ate it, you just simply need to read the nutritional labels. Don't get caught up in science that fits your bias, just read the damn food labels. Notice how in your own experience you feel better and strong eating meat too. 

[undeather]

6 minutes ago, Stovo said:

@undeather Your trust in institutions and science is strong I see, I understand I have been there. 

Consider 1) funding flows for science, and 2) scientists own self biases

The evidence that red meat is good for you is not only the fact our ancestors ate it, you just simply need to read the nutritional labels. Don't get caught up in science that fits your bias, just read the damn food labels. Notice how in your own experience you feel better and strong eating meat too. 

It's not about trust - it's about actually doing the god damn work.
I have spent the last 9 years studying and practicing medicine, analyzing thousands of papers, doing the statistical analysis myself, writing for journals, going into integral/holistic medicine, critiquing our mainstream biomedical models, working out my own epistemiology with people like Daniel Schmachtenberger - so when I tell you something, it's not this ruminated pile of garbage information I found on youtube or some unfounded trust in a particular institution. 

I am so sick of people falling into this anti-science trench. Nothing personal against you Stovo, but when you mention things like funding or bias, do you even have the slightest clue what you are talking about? Be really honest with yourself: Do you know how funding works? Because let me tell you that this alone is a incredibly complex topic and since you have propably never conducted a study, you dont know jackshit about it. Its always these strawmen arguments and this inflated sense of "knowing whats really going on" thats ubiquitous in todays information ecology.

Everyone is biased and thats why we NEED the scientific method. To not fall for personal biases is the basis of any scientific investigation. This is why we have well desgined placebo-controlled randomized trials and objective statistical standards to evaluate the data. This is what science is all about and you use it as an argument against scientists? This is literally what half of philosophy of science/epistemiology is actually about. In fact, the most biased information you will find is from random videos, blogposts or books on the internet. But it seems like people think that those inidividuals somehow know more and think clearer than the scientist who works everyday on a given topic for decades. 

Yes, there is also appropriate critique since sciece itself is inherently reductive but please, stop with that nonsense.

Also, food lables? What does a food lable tell me? Absolutely nothing which is relevant to this discussion.
Where on the food lable can I get the information about saturated fat being casucally connected with heart disease?
What about the effect of heme-iron or acrylamides? 
What about the connection between red meat & colon cancer?

Its such a stupid argument, almost to the point of being insulting.
Show some humility my friend.

[Scholar]

25 minutes ago, undeather said:

It's not about trust - it's about actually doing the god damn work.
I have spent the last 9 years studying and practicing medicine, analyzing thousands of papers, doing the statistical analysis myself, writing for journals, going into integral/holistic medicine, critiquing our mainstream biomedical models, working out my own epistemiology with people like Daniel Schmachtenberger - so when I tell you something, it's not this ruminated pile of garbage information I found on youtube or some unfounded trust in a particular institution. 

I am so sick of people falling into this anti-science trench. Nothing personal against you Stovo, but when you mention things like funding or bias, do you even have the slightest clue what you are talking about? Be really honest with yourself: Do you know how funding works? Because let me tell you that this alone is a incredibly complex topic and since you have propably never conducted a study, you dont know jackshit about it. Its always these strawmen arguments and this inflated sense of "knowing whats really going on" thats ubiquitous in todays information ecology.

Everyone is biased and thats why we NEED the scientific method. To not fall for personal biases is the basis of any scientific investigation. This is why we have well desgined placebo-controlled randomized trials and objective statistical standards to evaluate the data. This is what science is all about and you use it as an argument against scientists? This is literally what half of philosophy of science/epistemiology is actually about. In fact, the most biased information you will find is from random videos, blogposts or books on the internet. But it seems like people think that those inidividuals somehow know more and think clearer than the scientist who works everyday on a given topic for decades. 

Yes, there is also appropriate critique since sciece itself is inherently reductive but please, stop with that nonsense.

Also, food lables? What does a food lable tell me? Absolutely nothing which is relevant to this discussion.
Where on the food lable can I get the information about saturated fat being casucally connected with heart disease?
What about the effect of heme-iron or acrylamides? 
What about the connection between red meat & colon cancer?

Its such a stupid argument, almost to the point of being insulting.
Show some humility my friend.

I do wonder how you would solve the epistemic problems from a layman's perspective. You seem to say "blind" trust in institutions is unfounded, my position is that trust in institutions is really all we have as laymen. There is no way I can verify in any meaningful way even the most trivial inormation about health out there, I must assume certain things to be true on the basis of me trusting the process or the institution.

Once the public loses trust in institutions, there is really nothing you can do, because the institutions are the foundation for knowledge making. No single individual could possibly verify all information, and even if they could, it would be a life's work. So we cannot expect laymen to just do the research themselves and come to conclusions.

 

In the end, all we can do is advocate for trust in institutions, almost blind trust. What else can the layman do in an information landscape as ours? If we undermine trust, we can undermine everything, because institutional trust is the basis of civilization. Laymen are not even equipped to "do their own research".

I have not yet found a really good resolution for this issue, it seems like either the system collapses due to lack of trust, or we open the door for corruption due to blind trust. But what else is there? People simply do not have the time and competency, nor self-consciousness, to be attempting to understand what is actually going on within the information landscape.

 

I have said it before, but one of the greatest challenges we are facing the 21st century is this epistemic problem of how to navigate modern information landscapes, because everything else depends on it.

Just think about how much time and effort it takes to educate a single person on this forum who is convinced otherwise. Even if you are completely rational it might not work. We cannot even think about progressing mankind because we are so busy trying to shovel out the endless garbage everyone is throwing our way.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Scholar

[zurew]

2 hours ago, Scholar said:

In the end, all we can do is advocate for trust in institutions, almost blind trust.

The idea would be to make a system where the independent participants are holding each other accountable. This can only be done if they are incentivised to do so, and this is sort of built in the current system already. 

Example:

Different institutions are making different vaccines to cure covid19. All independent institutions have an incentive to point out the flaws in other vaccines because that way they can dominate the market with their vaccines and they can make more money.

 

3 hours ago, Stovo said:

Consider 1) funding flows for science, and 2) scientists own self biases

Whats your alternative system/solution though? Both of your points have so much worse alternatives compared to science and the scientific process, and thats the problem.

 

Funding in and of itself is not a bad thing.

Without funding, research cannot happen. Why would anyone do science if their return on invesment is negative? Why would anyone do any science for free, if they need to invenst in millions and millions of dollars to do research?  Of course, the funding aspect could sometimes make the whole process more flawed, but other institutions are incentivised to point out the flaws in those studies (especially, if the market is competitive). Also, this is why the peer review process exist, this is why institutions with biased, shit studies can't pass through the peer review grinder without notice (but even if  they could, the chances are really really low).

Edited August 1, 2022 by zurew

[Scholar]

32 minutes ago, zurew said:

The idea would be to make a system where the independent participants are holding each other accountable. This can only be done if they are incentivised to do so, and this is sort of built in the current system already. 

Example:

Different institutions are making different vaccines to cure covid19. All independent institutions have an incentive to point out the flaws in other vaccines because that way they can dominate the market with their vaccines and they can make more money.

To establish the fact that they are incentivised to do so, or that independent participants even exists, requires institutions. And it will require faith in those institutions to have faith in the process.

You'll end up just moving the epistemic problem one layer down, and the skeptic can still point to that and say "But this is corrupt, I don't trust this! How can I know these participants even are independent? What if it's all a lie?".

 

Edited August 1, 2022 by Scholar