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123409871234 commented on The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring   unsettledscience.substack... · Posted by u/RelaxedTree
123409871234 · 3 years ago
The author of this post is not a scientist, but rather a journalist with no scientific credentials, who has a long history of being a promoter and propagandist for the meat industry:

"Meat lobby peddles doubt to undermine dietary guidelines

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, updated every five years, never fails to cause a stir. For the current revision, released in February, a federally appointed scientific committee — after a two-year review of the latest research and numerous public hearings — has recommended (PDF) lowering consumption of red meat and processed meat.

Despite being fairly tepid, this advice set off a media firestorm, driven by a defensive meat industry and others who have been muddying the waters for some time on the role of meat in the diet. The meat lobby is taking full advantage of the current “debate.”

Adding to the confusion is Nina Teicholz, the best-selling author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” whose recent attempts to discredit the committee’s recommendations on meat have been published in The New York Times, alongside meat industry trade publications such as Beef Magazine and Cattle Network."

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/5/meat-lobby-pedd...

123409871234 commented on The challenge of finding new tools to fight prostate cancer   arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/Tomte
motte · 4 years ago
There are a lot of overgeneralized statements here and facts that border on misleading. Metastatic prostate cancer is relatively rare and most patients with prostate cancer generally pass from other diseases long before pc progression
123409871234 · 4 years ago
It's not particularly rare. Even if prostate cancer will only kill a small percentage of men that have it, it's such a common cancer that it still ends up killing around 34,130 men a year in the US making it the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the US. Figures are similar for other countries.

source: https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/prostate-cancer/statisti...

123409871234 commented on New model could explain old cholesterol mystery   sciencenorway.no/choleste... · Posted by u/shadykiller
sfink · 5 years ago
The "thoroughness" of the research doesn't matter much when it's based upon a false assumption or two.

You describe one mechanism by which cholesterol could cause heart disease. As you say, there is lots of evidence that it happens -- in an unknown subset of the population, with defining characteristics that nobody's managed to figure out.

The science just isn't there. And the financial success of statins seems to really get in the way of people wanting to work it all out.

123409871234 · 5 years ago
The molecular mechanism by which cholesterol causes heart disease is well understood, and atherosclerosis has been experimentally induced in every species of mammal ever studied by either feeding the animals a high cholesterol diet or knocking out genes related to LDL metabolism, and these results are consistent between hundreds of studies performed over the past 100 years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4525717/
123409871234 commented on New model could explain old cholesterol mystery   sciencenorway.no/choleste... · Posted by u/shadykiller
superqd · 5 years ago
So much nutrition research is all correlation and no causation. Statements like this, which over-infer, kill me:

"There is little doubt that people with high cholesterol have an increased risk of disease."

It's just as valid to say that people with heart disease are more likely to have high cholesterol. When all you have is correlation, there is a heart disease group, and a high cholesterol group, and all you shown with correlation is that there is a third overlapping group of people with both. With only correlation, you don't know how/why, or even if, members of one group transform into the other. Which is partly the underpinning of the article.

It's possible that high cholesterol is a result of underlying heart disease (which the article says is possible), rather than a cause. But what shocks me is that people, even researchers, seem surprised to realize such possibilities.

123409871234 · 5 years ago
We know that high cholesterol is a cause of heart disease rather than a mere correlation because people with genetic Hypercholesterolemia have a rate of heart disease 10-20x that of the general population, independent of other risk factors: https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2020/06/01...

u/123409871234

KarmaCake day20February 13, 2021View Original