Blogosaurus Vex

March 26th, 2009

Just going to work so not much time to polish this, but I wanted to get it out before I head out the door:

Have you all read the new study on the hazards of eating meat?  I’ll save you the suspense: it’s bad for you.  Death, cancer, heart attack, stroke.  EAT PLANTS!  (Link to study at bottom.)

This study compared several eating patterns, including red meat, white meat, and processed meat as separate categories, and sorted by amount eaten.  It then measured health outcomes: general mortality, cancer, and cardiovascular disease (heart attack and stroke).  This is the single biggest and probably most important study ever done on the effects of eating meat and it is enormously important for people to understand it.

The study is impressive for its sheer size – over 500,000 individuals, which is astronomical (and has the advantage of cancelling out a number of interependent variables).  Also it was a prospective study, so the hypothesis was generated before hand and watched for rather than post hoc fitting the findings to some newly generated hypothesis.  And those half million people have been being followed for a decade and they’re still going.

The only type of study more powerful than this would be a randomized controlled trial, where people are assigned to conditions or controls – but it’s not possible to do this sort of study when it comes to eating habits in the real world.  In the real world, it’s much more useful (and also practical) to study people’s actual habits, which tend to stay stable.  The confounds here are, for example, what elements are also associated with red meat eating that could cause death (the study authors note smoking as a potential confound).  But this is the beauty of the huge n study – many confounds will be cancelled out due to enormous breadth of participants.

The hazard ratios (the multiplier of getting a certain disease outcome because of exposure to a certain risk factor) are broken down by disease, gender, and level of consumption – very informative!  For example, if you are in the top 20% of red meat eaters and a woman, you are 1.2 times more likely to die of cancer than someone in the bottom quintile (20%).  1.2 times might not sound like a lot but it amounts to a 20% increase over a population, which is enormous!  And what if you’re in that 20%?  And that’s just the top meat eaters.

These numbers would almost certainly be even higher (I am guessing) if they had had a “control” group of strictly non-meat eating people.

You can read the actual study here:
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/169/6/562

Posted in Society/Politics, Veganism | 5 Comments »