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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • No, it doesn’t tell us nothing. These kinds of limitations are not uncommon for nutrition studies. It just is weaker evidence that doesn’t tell everything we ever might want. Studies will always have some methodological limitations. There is always some factor you might be forgetting or could do better. Science doesn’t work by looking at induvidial studies alone. We take things in aggregate

    That being said, of course things like RCTs will always be preferred and considered much stronger evidence. On that front, there have been some RCTs in other related health risk incidents with similar findings. For instance, I have read about some RCT studies for cardiovascular health. One meat industry funded review of RCT studies on cardiovascular risk for red meat found plant substitution improved predictors of cardiovascular health

    Substituting red meat with high-quality plant protein sources, but not with fish or low-quality carbohydrates, leads to more favorable changes in blood lipids and lipoproteins.

    https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.118.035225#d3646671e1

    Or from another review looking at larger changes

    Nevertheless, several RCTs have examined the effect of vegetarian diets on intermediate risk factors of cardiovascular diseases (Table 1). In a meta-analysis of RCTs, Wang et al. (22) found vegetarian diets to significantly lower blood concentrations of total, LDL, HDL, and non-HDL cholesterol relative to a range of omnivorous control diets. Other meta-analyses have found vegetarian diets to lower blood pressure, enhance weight loss, and improve glycemic control to greater extent than omnivorous comparison diets (23-25). Taken together, the beneficial effects of such diets on established proximal determinants of cardiovascular diseases found in RCTs, and their inverse associations with hard cardiovascular endpoints found in prospective cohort studies provide strong support for the adoption of healthful plant-based diets for cardiovascular disease prevention

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S1050173818300240



  • Yes, this new study has limitations. The authors do note that and aren’t pretending otherwise. This is coming in the context of other studies with similar conclusions which the original article talks about. This new study is a singular imperfect data point, but is combined with other data points that point in the same direction.

    What it is primarily helpful for is in that it has a large N value of 79,468 participants and the population they are looking at doesn’t partake in as many carcinogens that make it harder to tell cancer rates apart (which is both a strength and also a study limitation too)

    From the study

    This study has several other strengths. 1) This is probably the single cancer cohort with the largest number of vegetarians, and especially vegans, who have rarely been studied effectively for cancer incidence. This allows consistent definitions and methods to be applied across all variables; 2) in many studies of vegetarians, vegetarian diets may be relatively transient for some subjects, but less so in AHS-2; 3) the level of validation available for the main variables on which the assignment to vegetarian diets is based; 4) the relatively large Black subgroup in which vegetarian diets have rarely been studied. Race is always a co-variate in our statistical models; and 5) the absence (practically) of cigarette smoking, a common confounder for many cancers, and very little alcohol

    There are also study limitations, the most prominent of which is still the relatively small numbers of less common cancers, particularly among the less common dietary patterns (vegans and pesco-vegetarians) that diminish statistical power; second, there is the relatively health-conscious low-meat-consuming reference group, the Adventist nonvegetarians, that also limits power; third, that we were able to measure dietary and other data only at study baseline and not during follow-up. Finally, there are the limitations of all observational studies, particularly the possibility of unmeasured confounding, which can be limited but never avoided






  • Humans and human ancestors have also been consuming large quantities of plants for far earlier than that. Here’s another paper looking 780,000 years ago finding a wide amount of plants consumed

    we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), at least 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities of our early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121

    I am not saying that hunting didn’t happen (it definitely did). I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it















  • Honey production is not exactly exploitation free. For instance, queen bees often have their wings clipped or are intentionally killed to be replaced by another

    Moreover, honey production also out competes native/wild bee populations which hurts them. Especially since honeybees are heavily used well outside their native ranges

    We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality

    https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.3939





  • Poultry farming is an industry where terms mean nothing. It is rife with horribly misleading terms that are completely unregulated or have weak definitions that are unenforced. This is not as uprising when you see it through that lens. It’s a continuation of existing absurdity that are less talked about

    For instance, “free-range” doesn’t actually have to mean being outdoors at all

    Bringing up a Tyson competitor, the farm manager wonders how other poultry companies handle supposedly free-range-raised chickens. The short answer: They don’t, really.

    “Those birds don’t go outside — you know that,” the technician replies. “They don’t all go out … Look that up online.”

    The manager chimes in: “It’s not like they make it like all of ’em come out and enjoy the sun.”

    “That is strictly for commercial [advertising] purposes,” the technician says.

    […]

    In 2017, the Intercept reported an investigation into a dozen California farms owned by a free-range chicken company that found no evidence of any animals spending any time outdoors. The chief animal care officer for Perdue Farms, a major chicken producer, has even said the vast majority of its free-range chickens stay indoors.

    https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23724740/tyson-chicken-free-range-humanewashing-investigation-animal-cruelty


    Also as a note, the ruling on this case was from last year

    EDIT: to clarify by “the case”, I mean the original article my comment is replying to