Meat has a bad reputation. Most people think of meat, especially red meat, as dangerously unhealthy. However, meat has unique properties that make it more nutritious, easier to digest, and less likely to irritate your body than vegetables. Does the science behind meat-phobia hold up under the microscope?
TLDR - Yes, meat is healthy - eat it.
This post has gotten a lot of interesting discussion. The real world is so messy though.
Most of us don’t have the willpower or desire to eat like the carnivores on the sub. They eat meat as fried chicken, cheese burgers, or pizza toppings with coke and alcohol etc.
So maybe we can say it’s not a superfood for everybody.
Most of us don’t have the willpower or desire to eat like the carnivores on the sub. They eat meat as fried chicken, cheese burgers, or pizza toppings with coke and alcohol etc.
I know you know better. Zero carb carnivore is not fried chicken, that has seed oil. It is not pizza, that has carbs. It is not a cheeseburger, that has buns. Sure, as hell is not Coke and alcohol. You have been stalking our community for long enough that you know zero carb carnivore is none of those things. To represent it as those things is disingenuous and quite frankly offensive. You know better
maybe we can say it’s not a superfood for everybody
The meat is the superfood, every bad thing in your example was from the plants.
You have been stalking our community for long enough
Nowadays, it’s been one of my favorite ways to pass time 😆. These kinds of discussions are rare in other communities and they draw me in. I also used to watch modern day debate on YT a lot.
Have you found any good debates between doctors? I found a few but they were just talking past each other. A good faith debate would be interesting
The closest I found was a neurosurgeon debating a naturopath but the naturopath didn’t share their references before the debate, so it was kinda a waste of everyones time because they asserted things from their references and wouldn’t budge so half the “debate” was the neurosurgeon saying “I haven’t read that reference”
The same one you posted in the community? Yea I didn’t find any debates like that. It seems most of the diet people prefer making response videos.
The ones I used to watch were mostly on religion, philosophy, and politics.
Zero carb carnivore is not fried chicken, that has seed oil.
yes. I’m not criticizing the ZC carnivore lifestyle. I’m questioning whether it can work out in a world full of hedonistic people. For example there are so many who know smoking or doing drugs is bad and still do it.
The meat is the superfood, every bad thing in your example was from the plants.
yea the way you eat it is probably healthy.
I think it can work with hedonistic people, we have to make people aware they are being hedonistic, and they are carbohydrate addicts. It’s just like alcohol addiction. They have to be supported, but they have to be aware they have a problem. Carbohydrates are so pervasive that most people don’t even realize they’re a bad thing, working against their health goals
So yes, smokers, drugs, people know they’re bad, you just need to bring the general level of nutritional knowledge up to that level. So people know that it’s the plants that are causing their long-term problems, not the meat.
Yeah for sure. Awareness and having support systems can work. 🤞
I think silly_goose is saying the average person doesn’t think eating zero carb like we recommend is normal, or even possible. That is consistent with my experience also.
But meat really is good for everyone :)
Yeah, I can see that now.
deleted by creator
wasn’t super bad for the environment
Good news! Ruminant meat is part of the biosphere, and is essential in maintaining soil health.
conceptually feed eight billion people a carnivore diet.
Let’s make progress, we don’t have to worry about perfection right now, lets make sure everyone in the global south has access to at least one egg a day.
deleted by creator
Please add the rapid depletion of top soil to your list - which has a very sustainable solution that involves embracing the natural biocycle.
deleted by creator
Do you know how many resources the world is spending taking care of nearly a billion type 2 diabetes every year? A sick population is a expensive population .
Much less the absolute ecological insanity of suggesting a carnivore diet.
It’s a tool, a very powerful health tool, and should not be diminished or hidden from people for philosophical reasons.
deleted by creator
I think there’s a false equivalence happening. Diabetes is not necessarily caused by a plant based diet or a reduced meat diet.
Type 2 diabetes is caused by persistently elevated insulin over a long period of time, which happens because of persistently high blood glucose levels over a long period of time, which is caused by persistently high carbohydrate consumption over a long period of time. Carbohydrates only come from plants. So yes, Type 2 Diabetes is a plant based diet problem. To be fair, there are many whole food plant based diets that don’t result in type 2 diabetes, but this is not a danger of a fully animal based eating pattern .
Update - Technically there is a miniscule amount of carbohydrates in meat in glycogen stores, but not enough to matter.
I wondered if indeed “most people think of meat, especially red meat, as dangerously unhealthy.” And if so, with the proliferation of misinformation, are these concerns warranted.
Comprehensive Review of Red Meat Consumption and the Risk of Cancer https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10577092/ From the abstract: “The evidence is strong for the association between red meat and breast cancer and most gastric cancers.”
Consumption of processed red meat and its impact on human health: A review https://academic.oup.com/ijfst/article/56/12/6115/7806301?login=false
But hey, what about the environmental concerns, after all an unhealthy environment would also be unhealthy for humans…
Sustainable meat consumption: global and regional greenhouse gas emission implications and counterfactual scenario analyses https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10668-023-03346-2 Less is better.
Meat Production and Consumption: Environmental Consequences https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211601X15001315 Less red meat, more veggies better.
The Environmental Cost of Red Meat: Striking the Right Balance Between Nutrition and Nature https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08901171221088661b
Sigh.
the environmental bits are dubiously methodized
Your environment bits
We all know the problems of industrial farming. It’s unsustainable
Fortunately the solution works for both me and you: permaculture
It makes soil rather than consuming it. It makes marginal land suitable for crops
Permaculture requires animals on the land to fertilise it, and crop plants to turn the shit to soil.
Much worse than beef farms though are grain farms
Comprehensive Review of Red Meat Consumption and the Risk of Cancer https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10577092/ From the abstract: "The evidence is strong for the association between red meat and breast cancer and most gastric cancers.
This looks to me to be a review of food frequency questionnaire studies which are famous for being only good for hypothesis generation, and not great at that. Where their research has been tested by interventional experiments they generally don’t survive, for example eggs and cholesterol.
Garbage in; garbage out
Are the rest of them the same? Bring interventional studies if you want to demonstrate causality, if your #1 reference is indicative all you’ve done is demonstrate you don’t know or don’t care about the explanatory power of different types of studies, and asking people what they ate in the last 5 years (tick the boxes in the categories on the form) are the least powerful, they don’t even demonstrate correlation clearly since they are so low resolution, so prone to healthy food answer bias, and so reliant on human memory of what they ate up to half a decade ago
Anyway people have been doing carnivore or zero carb or zero fibre in modern times for 20 years, if meat was as dangerous as your poor quality studies say the would certainly be studies of the high cancer rate and heart attacks in the carnivore community
Low vegetable is a category all it’s own.
And most people don’t get enough fiber and they don’t eat enough vegetables.
It’s funny. You mix vegetarianism with carnivorism and you get the perfect omnivorous diet. Crazy!!!
enough fibre
Funny, I can’t find a number for the minimum fibre intake for optimum health, it’s almost like fibre isn’t a nutrient for humans
Removed by mod
Fiber isnt a nutrient, our bodies cant digest it… and thus why its important.
It’s valuable to us like cars are valuable to highways, except our guts have a job without cars
Out of the analogy fibre is good for blocking uptake of what you eat and slowing down too fast digestion, which is great if what you’re eating isn’t good for you, but which you don’t want if you only eat stuff that is entirely good
Sigh.
If only there was a article at the top of this talking about these studies and putting them in the proper context of their evidentiary strengths.
But if you prefer you can also see the same counters written in a different format here https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/red-meat#cancer
Before I read your papers, please let me know if you have actually read them and are willing to talk about each one in detail?
“If only there was a article at the top of this talking about these studies and putting them in the proper context of their evidentiary strengths.” https://fedia.io/u/@jet@hackertalks.com - OP
It appears that the first comment on the blog you’ve posted is from 12 years ago, as I cannot find a specific date this blog post was created, let’s assume that it’s approximately 12 years old. This would also jibe well with the literature citations at the end of the blog post, which range fro 1930 to 2012, most recent paper 14 years ago. Allow me to note that this blog post is probably not rebutting papers, such as the ones I’ve cited that were published from 2021-2023 wrt the health effects, and 2015-2024 for the environmental papers, because that is how time works.
That is a weird linking standard. I think you can just use @jet@hackertalks.com and do the same thing, then anyone on any instance can use the link locally.
It appears that the first comment on the blog you’ve posted is from 12 years ago, as I cannot find a specific date this blog post was created, let’s assume that it’s approximately 12 years old. This would also jibe well with the literature citations at the end of the blog post, which range fro 1930 to 2012, most recent paper 14 years ago. Allow me to note that this blog post is probably not rebutting papers, such as the ones I’ve cited that were published from 2021-2023 wrt the health effects, and 2015-2024 for the environmental papers, because that is how time works.
Have you read your papers fully? Are you willing to discuss them in detail?
Did you miss the burden of proof for categories like ‘low vegetable’ or ‘low fiber?’
Could you explain what you mean?
Sure, check it out: https://www.healthdata.org/research-analysis/health-topics/burden-proof
Low vegetable is a 3 star problem… Decent amount of evidence, but not ironclad (like smoking.)
While unprocessed redmeat consumption only has a one star (very weak evidence.)
Is this in rebuttal to Dr. Ede’s article? Which part of her article are you rebutting? Which primary source are you using? Have you read the primary source and are you willing to discuss the paper?
are there any studies on the impact of a meat-only diet on the gut microbiome?
Sure are, here you go https://lemmy.zip/post/64353462
TLDR - the gut is healthy and diverse.
thanks! i found this:
However, the beneficial effects appear to be dependent on broader lifestyle factors. Participants who followed a carnivore diet also simultaneously engaged in sufficient sleep, physical activity and stress management. This highlights that the carnivore diet in isolation is unlikely to be universally beneficial
Our findings suggest that the carnivore diet could potentially have therapeutic relevance for gut barrier impairment or other forms of functional dysbiosis (Bischoff et al. 2014). However, the beneficial effects appear to be dependent on broader lifestyle factors. Participants who followed a carnivore diet also simultaneously engaged in sufficient sleep, physical activity and stress management. This highlights that the carnivore diet in isolation is unlikely to be universally beneficial and must be contextualized within an overall health-promoting lifestyle.
You need to contextualize it!
Ultimately, this study supports the growing notion that there is no universal dietary prescription for optimizing gut microbiota composition or function. In particular, our findings challenge the assumption that high dietary fiber intake is essential for a healthy microbiota, especially a highly diverse one
I assume your initial question was about fibre - the point is you can have a diverse gut microbiota without fibre.
yes. i’m re-thinking the “eat more fiber” propaganda
I’m not sure if it’s propaganda either, it likely originated from the hypothesis Dr. Denis Burkitt had in Uganda where he observed that Africans eating high-fibre unrefined diets (likely high-carb low-fat in modern parlance) had stools that were bulkier and transited more rapidly compared to Westerners.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2659900/
In other words it was an observation. It was not controlled nor randomized and the fact that fibre has this huge health halo was in my opinion caused by the fact that processed foods such as oatmeal could then be marketed using fibre as a selling point.
Even in this 2006 review we already had better studies showing that fibre had no positive health effects associated with colorectal cancer:
The combined data showed no outcome difference between the intervention and control groups in the number of subjects with at least one adenoma or a new diagnosis of colorectal cancer. The Cochrane reviewers (7) concluded that there was no evidence from randomized controlled trials to suggest that increased dietary fibre intake would reduce the incidence or recurrence of adenomatous polyps.
Nor was fibre clearly associated with positive effects in GI issues such as diverticular disease or irritable bowel syndrome.
DD:
In one of the first randomized, placebo-controlled trials of the role of bran in patients with DD (17), the authors concluded that dietary fibre supplements do nothing more than relieve constipation, and the impression that fibre helps DD is “simply a manifestation of western civilization’s obsession with the need for frequent defecation”.
IBS:
In practice, many patients with IBS complain of bloating with higher doses of natural fibre, likely due to bacterial fermentation producing short-chain fatty acids, increasing colonic gas and distension, and hence, aggravating IBS symptoms.
Edit: figure it might help to put fibre stuff in one place. Here’s the only study that I know of studying fibre and idiopathic (unknown medical causes) constipation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3435786/
TL;DR Idiopathic constipation and its associated symptoms can be effectively reduced by stopping or even lowering the intake of dietary fibre.
Lastly, here’s a wonderful talk by two experts, Dr Zoë Harcombe and Dr Peter Brukner on the topic.
Apologies for writing a wall of text.
yes. i’m re-thinking the “eat more fiber” propaganda
Well, it’s not really propaganda, it’s just advice for a different metabolic context. Fibre is a anti-nutrient, it reduces what you absorb from food. If your eating bad food, like highly processed sugars/carbs then fibre is reducing the damage. Fibre also ferments in the gut producing some short chain fatty acids which do feed the gut, however in a ketogenic metabolism SCAFs are produced in the liver and get delivered to the whole body.
So, in a high-carb highly-processed food context - fibre is a net positive because the food is so deleterious to health, and it does provide a tiny amount of SCFAs for people who are not in ketosis. The secret here is the standard diet is so bad (typically called SAD), almost any change will improve health.
In a low-carb ketogenic diet with healthy food - fibre is unnecessary.
Georgia Ede is a great writer, but a real boomer when it comes to website design, yes there is a popup straight out of the 1990s.
