The mistake is trying to to scry personal life guidance out of research papers. Research papers just describe experimental results, and sometimes unsound ones.
They're meant to feed further research and bring prestige to the authors, not to help intellectuals hyperoptimize their longevity or whatever.
It's a widespread mistake, especially among intellectuals who take pride in being able to read jargon, but what you're calling "impossible to deal with" is actually just the outcome of trying to use things in a way they're not meant to be used.
If you really want guidance (you actually don't need much), either look to traditions if you're comfortable with that or turn to institutional guidelines if you want something that feels more evidence-based and modern. Neither of those is unassailable either, but at least then you're using things as intended. You'll have less grief and frustration that way.
> turn to institutional guidelines if you want something that feels more evidence-based and modern.
"feels" is the right word here, unfortunately. Often, these are heavily out of date, influenced by power struggles inside the institutions and by external incentives, and get watered down by the need for generality and for avoiding liability. So the average person is left with very little to go by, which is why people either flock to study after study, choose "bro science" instead, or just stick to traditions even in places where they're not helpful.
Upvoted to raise awareness. The average DYOR type is lacking a lot of context with regard to research goals and process. There aren't absolutes, there are snapshots or milestones of understanding given specific criteria - at best.
there's a strange phenomenon when you try to dig deeper than current accepted textbooks and read pubmed, you end up in less certainty. Science behave like a lens, validated data (yet about to be obsolete potentially) is in focus, illogical is fuzzy, but unproven is fuzzy too.
Nah. "Beef" is too broad a category. There are lean cuts and high fat cuts, there are many methods of preparation and countless ways to season. Someone eating maple glazed brisket with a side of extra crispy bacon and buttered scrambled eggs is very different from someone else eating a grilled sirloin seasoned with salt and black pepper.
This crusade against red meat is honestly tiring.
I subscribe to "eat a little bit of everything in moderation. Mostly what's available in nature and what someone in a farm or at home could produce. Be mindful of the total number of calories. Try not to burn or overcook food in general. Exercise a little bit most days. Don't neglect sleep."
(Which to me reads like a lot of common sense advice that my grandparents already knew and followed with no struggle)
I believe the crusade against red meat comes mostly from the environmental footprint which is pretty much the same for sirloin and brisket, and significant even for industrial grown cattle.
If that were truly the case the crusaders would be trying to stymie the meat industry on environmental legislative grounds. Instead all we get is some abstracted sense of blame at the consumer level, no real action, no real teeth, no real change to industry or society.
How do you suggest people change a massive, incumbent, dominant animal ag industry married to the government (e.g. billions of subsidies per year, ag-gag laws) without changing personal attitudes about animal ag and consumer level behavior? And why can't they do both at once?
Animal-free products from nut milks to meat alternatives are a growing industry, so clearly something is working without having to somehow do the impossible task of changing the government and doing it independent of popular opinion.
The output of nutrition science (using the word "science" loosely - the epistemic standard is not very high) must be examined with the understanding that the field is extraordinarily biased by religious and political considerations, e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327179700_The_Globa...
In particular, there are a number of political and religious factions opposed especially to red meat.
Yeah I stopped paying attention to cancer research. Someone should aggregate all the cancer headlines just to show people how many of them there are.
I lost my SO 6 years ago to a weird form of cancer that fed on her estrogen, so doctors tried to put her into menopause to stop its growth. That's hell on earth, like taking away the soul of a woman.
So for years every single cancer headline made me react, but after a while you get jaded because you never see them lead anywhere.
my father is currently dealing with male equivalent of this (prostate cancer) . Yea taking away a harmone is a slow and painful march to death. I don't wish this on anyone.
I've given up on 'scientific' nutritional advice and now go with my intuition informed by my personal observations. What I have observed is that people who eat lots of carbs seem to get fat, people who eat lots of processed foods look terrible all around, people who are vegan tend to look like cancer patients, people who are vegetarian but also eat eggs and/or fish look reasonably healthy, and people who eat lots of roasted meat, vegetables and eggs seem to have the best outcomes.
I trust my observations of people I know more than the claims of celebrities. The vegans I've met have pallor skin, very low muscle mass, and look 10-15 years older than they really are. Vegan diets are very often deficient in various nutrients so their bodies start to cannibalize muscle mass and skin tissue, leading to weakness and premature aging. That's what my observations and intuition tells me.
If you don't want to eat cute animals that's fine, I think you can be reasonably healthy eating a mostly vegetarian diet with some eggs and small fish. But complete veganism is slow death, I won't go there.
Vegans look like cancer patients and are slowly dying, and vegan celebrities are lying. These are some bold takes.
A simple Google search will tell you vegans actually have a longer life expectancy (among other health benefits). Although it's not totally clear why this is.
So maybe the vegans who look like cancer patients to you are in fact old healthy vegans ;-)
Just walk into any significant veg(an) restaurant at a busy hour and look around you. You' might even find the opposite of what you are made to believe to be true.
But no matter what, I'm afraid you will convince yourself you don't have the obligation to adjust any corrupted views, but do the opposite because you can't handle the reality. And sadly you're far from alone.
And actually I get it. It's not easy to open your eyes and acknowledge your part in the (largely unnecessary) immense suffering we bring to billions of animals each year, and the destruction that comes with animal agriculture.
But please don't make it harder for the people who are trying to change things a bit, and stop spreading your made up stuff and ancient myths.
For me all this BS is the only actually difficult part of being a vegan.
Not impossible, just a potential "lower quality of information?"
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've grown to understand the following:
My grandma, with whom I share a bunch of DNA, lived to be a healthy 100 and drank milk to the very end; which is why I'm probably going to do the same. The quality of that "datapoint" for me is (almost objectively) much higher than ANY study could ever produce?
- "Eat whole food, not too much, (maybe) mostly plants". Do some form of exercise for some time at least 5/7 days.
- Listen to your body and do what makes you feel best (e.g. types of foods, meal timing and # of meals per day, types of exercises and amounts). I really believe that people's bodies work differently enough that even excluding extreme cases, no one diet is best for everyone
- Genetics, some people are just unlucky or lucky
Also for cancer, 99% of things have increase your risk by some amount; including every food, because simply metabolizing causes chemical reactions which (when unlucky) cause cancer. The important things to watch out for are those which carry a very noticeable, substantial increase, like benzene and radiation; studies show that red meat and nitrites correlate with increased risk, but it's ambiguous how significant they are especially with the other correlated factors (like bad eating in general).
My least favorite genre is the 100 papers saying X is bad to eat and 100 saying X is good to eat. Just have common sense and eat everything in moderation. Food absolutists are weird/annoying. Especially the trad-fascist "seed oils and soy bad, red meat good" crowd. Just a bunch of dorks.
This might sound like the naturalistic fallacy, but if people have been eating things in quantity for hundreds of thousands of years, the worst outcomes have probably been weeded out of the gene pool.
If it’s new in the last 10,000 years (the beginning of agriculture) we have at least some hope that the worst problems have been dealt with, although we do have lactose and gluten intolerance as counter examples.
If it’s new to the human diet in the last hundred years, maybe it’s fine, and maybe it isn’t. It has to pretty obviously kill you for people to notice.
Animals, fruit, and root vegetables have been in the human diet since before humans left Africa. That’s my rule of thumb.
Yes, but people are often interested in nutrition not to avoid 'worst outcomes', but to reduce risk factors as they age. Evolution isn't so good at selecting for diets that push the median life expectancy from 75 to 85.
Agriculture may have existed for 10k years or something, but it's not like everyone switched over to that lifestyle immediately. There have also been peoples that lived as nomadic herders and even hunter gatherers into even modern to almost-modern times.
Yes. My ancestry is mostly British isles, and it looks like agriculture took hold there only about 6000 years ago. Possibly arrived with the Indo-Europeans?
The entire point of diet advice and nutritional science is trying to find out what "in moderation" means for different foods. The amount of donuts that is moderate and the amount of broccoli that is moderate are not equal.
Quite a bit of nutrition research is simply useless. They ask a bunch of people what they ate and then try to correlate that with health outcomes. You will never learn anything that way, though it might give you areas for further research.
The next step up is a randomized controlled trial, but instead of choosing health outcomes they choose measurements of lab tests as their endpoints. Someone’s cholesterol went up or down by some small number. What did we learn? Nothing.
Unfortunately good research is outrageously expensive, so it doesn’t get done.
Mixed results can also be evidence that everything is fraudulent and nobody is even pretending to try and replicate things. And as a layperson, even honest noise isn't useful.
That’s simply because confirmation bias heavily influences perspective. If I want something to be true, I wouldn’t be hard pressed to find research or conduct my own that could make a solid argument for it.
Often context matters. Something can be good for one cancer and bad for another. Or be good for cancer but bad for heart disease. Or bad for cancer but good for heart disease. Something may cause cancer if you force feed far more than a human could reasonably consume, but harmless at normal quantities.
which is why so many of us just say "moderation and eat a varied diet". Once in a while science settles on something that is true for everyone, but real science is hard.
