What’s Up With Red Meat? (More Crap “Science”)

It seems like one of the media’s most cherished pastimes is to run around promoting crap science as some kind of new breakthrough.  It really doesn’t look like anyone reporting on this stuff can take 5min to ask themselves thing like, “does this even make any sense? Is this even well done science?” before they go around blabbering about new “facts.”

Case in point, there is a new study out claiming to prove that “eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely.”  This is another piece of junk science.  The authors should be ashamed of themselves for the claims that they are making, but instead they are on CNN.

Major Issues That I See:

#1. NO CAUSE AND EFFECT WHATSOEVER: If you read the interviews of people associated with this study they say thing like, “This is a slam-dunk to say that, ‘Yes, indeed, if people want to be healthy and live longer, consume less red and processed meat’ ” as Barry M. Popkin did.  In other words they are saying that this study establishes a cause and effect – eating red meat causes bad stuff.

REALLY!?

In science there is this rule that says, association (especially with low quality data) is NOT causation.  Here’s an ice cream metaphor:

In the summer ice cream consumption goes up.  In the summer time murder also goes up.  So there IS a positive association between ice cream consumption and murder to be sure.  However, do you think that it makes any sense to go around claiming that ice cream causes the murder rate to go up in the summer time?

This is EXACTLY what the authors of this study did, and they are on CNN.

If you want to establish cause and effect then you need to do an intervention study – you need to intervene in people’s lives and see what happens.  In the ice cream scenario you would need to feed people extra ice cream and see if they then go on shooting sprees.  BUT, you actually have to do that research BEFORE you go around claiming that ice cream is a killer and recommending that people avoid ice cream and the people who eat it.

In the case of red meat and mortality, then you need to take a bunch of people and intervene in their diets and see what happens before you can go around making cause and effect claims

Oh, and we’ve  done the intervention studies MANY times.  We’ve had people eat less saturated fat and cholesterol and MORTALITY GOES UP, not down!

#2. Relying on memory: This study used something called a “food frequency questionnaire” (FFQ) to determine people’s intake of red meat.  We worked with FFQ’s in my nutrition classes last semester at UMD.  They suck!

Here’s why:  An FFQ is a VERY long (so boring) questionnaire about what you eat, how often and in what quantities over the past 6-12 MONTHS!  I am in my late 20′s and pay more attention to what I eat on a daily basis than almost anyone I know, and I could not answer the questions on the FFQ accurately.  (The people in this study were between 50 and 71.)  On most of the questions of my FFQ I was just guessing – I have no idea how many ounces of cantaloupe I ate per week over the past 12 months.  The questions are completely ridiculous.

I don’t know how the researchers could take the info from a bunch of FFQ’s seriously – its just 545,000 guesses.

Consider this another installment of “don’t trust the media to check scientific facts for you!”

Josef Brandenburg is Washington, DC’s #1 fat-loss expert for busy people.  He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have.  To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here.