from Hacker News

Is Red Meat Healthy? Multiverse Analysis Has Lessons Beyond Meat

by andromaton on 6/1/24, 11:27 AM with 75 comments

• by PaulHoule on 6/1/24, 12:20 PM

  One of my favorite books is

  https://www.amazon.com/Crime-America-Cambridge-Studies-Crimi...

  as it points out the limitations of the social sciences and generally why people don’t find science satisfying, particularly looking at it scientifically as opposed to “here is a paper I can use as a weapon to justify my dogma”.

  In that book, researchers analyze just about every theory of the crime drop and got inconclusive results. The one exception was a chapter which was not quantitative at all but rather spun the story the black people in NYC switched from cocaine and heroin to passing around a blunt, sipping from 40s, and having a chill time.

• by DarkNova6 on 6/1/24, 12:20 PM

  The key sentence most are probably looking for is:

  > The median HR was 0.94 (IQR, 0.83-1.05) for the effect of red meat on all-cause mortality — ie, not significant.

  However, the article (and the study) are absolutely worth a read. Another main take-away is:

  > I hope you read this paper and think about it every time you read an observational study that finds a positive or negative association between two things. Ask: What if the researchers were as careful as Zeraatkar and colleagues and did multiple different analyses? Would the finding hold up to a series of plausible analytic choices?

• by belter on 6/1/24, 12:39 PM

  For all that prefer their scientific communications to start with the conclusions:

  "Of the 48 analyses deemed statistically significant, 40 indicated that red meat consumption reduced early death and eight indicated that eating red meat led to higher mortality."

• by hackernoteng on 6/1/24, 1:39 PM

  All I know is I feel amazing eating lots of leaner red meat. The nutrient content is very high (B-vitamins, zinc, etc.) and hard to get elsewhere. I probably eat 5 lbs of red meat per week. Im in my 50s, fit, and have healthy bloodwork.

• by Tade0 on 6/1/24, 1:10 PM

  There's red meat and Red Meat.

  Boars and pigs are closely related, but meat from the latter has twice the calories of the former - largely due to its extreme fat content.

  I had to lay off red meat due to typical sedentary lifestyle induced health issues, but I found that the problem isn't exactly in the species consumed, but in the ridiculous amount of fat that's present in factory farmed animals.

  On the flipside game meat is perfectly fine, even if expensive.

• by tomohawk on 6/1/24, 12:12 PM

  One thing about these red meat studies is that they do not discern those who are on a carnivore diet (no plants - no alcohol, no sugar, no grains, etc) and those who have red meat as part of a mixed diet.

  Having been on a carnivore diet for a while, and seeing many medical problems resolve that had not resolved with many medical interventions by doctors, it would be great to see more studies take a look at this.

• by wwarner on 6/3/24, 1:55 PM

  "Multiverse Analysis" is a terrible name, that can only introduce confusion, even if it increases readership. This methodology is more about machine learning than it is about covering all possible worlds. I'm also suspicious of the entire approach. In order to compare two different methods of analysis, you have to do some kind of mapping or weighting or meta-analysis that tells you why comparing two numbers makes any sense at all. This result must be tautological, in the sense that every expected value and variance can be computed and compared to another of the thousands of methods employed, and when we pour in the data it has to fall within the expected ranges, otherwise we know we've made a mistake in the original calculation.

• by ofrzeta on 6/1/24, 12:53 PM

  They should probably start with defining what "red meat" actually is. Personally I don't believe that fresh meat of various animals is unhealthy but I try to consume less to none of "red meat products", that is processed meat with nitrite curing salt.

• by monero-xmr on 6/1/24, 12:14 PM

  Your body isn’t really digesting plants. It’s getting what nutritional value it can out of it and then pooping the rest out. Mostly it becomes fiber, which is good for you, but it is not going to provide real value like meat does. Meat is the key to a healthy diet.

• by OutOfHere on 6/1/24, 2:58 PM

  Even unprocessed red meat increases the all-cause mortality risk by 3%. Refer to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32011623/ which states:

  > Intake of processed meat (adjusted HR, 1.03 [95% CI, 1.02-1.05]; adjusted ARD, 0.90% [95% CI, 0.43%-1.38%]) or unprocessed red meat (adjusted HR, 1.03 [95% CI, 1.01-1.05]; adjusted ARD, 0.76% [95% CI, 0.19%-1.33%]) was significantly associated with all-cause mortality.

• by ein0p on 6/1/24, 2:01 PM

  Rejoice all ye faithful, the yearly flippening of whether red meat is good for you has arrived. Avail yourselves of steak before “scientific consensus” flips again a year from now.

• by andromaton on 6/2/24, 8:03 PM

  I found this interesting because of its multiverse approach not because it's about red meat. I would have found it even more yet separately interesting if the median HR was 0.1 or 10.

• by zzzeek on 6/1/24, 2:01 PM

  people who consume red meat are likely to be in higher income brackets hence have better access to healthcare and less stressful lives

• by demondemidi on 6/1/24, 1:39 PM

  This should be a banned topic. There’s never any insight just righteous posturing.

• by xchip on 6/1/24, 1:44 PM

  TL;DR:

  "Zeraatkar and colleagues have shown that there are thousands of plausible ways to analyze the data, and this can lead to very different findings. In the specific question of red meat and mortality, their many analyses yielded a null result. "