I've not seen the study but the wording on the beeb
Suggested that this was done of people who ate red meat everyday.
So I'm assuming the study also looked at people who eat other meat everyday, as well as those who eat no meat. So basically I am veggy 2 days a week, eat chicken 2 days and red meat maybe 3 or less. Does this mean I'm 2/7th immortal?
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Nostrebor can't be everything all the time., Tue 13 Mar 2012, 9:12,
Reply)
Here's the press release
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/hsop-rmc030812.php
which is slightly more detailed, but still doesn't give you the baseline risk.
(, Tue 13 Mar 2012, 10:10, Reply)
Here's the original article
archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/archinternmed.2011.2287v1.pdf
I'm just going through it to see how robust it is :D
edit: It's altogether not a bad study - it's just poorly represented by the Torygraph article.
The 12% reduction in deaths from only having half a daily portion of red meat (either processed or unprocessed) is only for deaths from strokes in women. It would also appear that there is greater variability in this population of people. For all-cause deaths, the reduction is lower (for not having that half-portion daily), more like 9.3% in men, and 7.6% in women.
It appears they compared high consumers of red meats with lower consumers (though, I'm reading this paper quickly, so I can't find this explicitly documented).
They have also run *a lot* of stats analysis on the data. Now, the sceptic in me would say that they may have done this to try and find a positive result with *anything* :P On the other hand, they have tried to account for nearly all the confounding factors (save for any listed below ;) )
tl;dr summary:
Not bad little study with lots of effort made to account for confounders. Telegraph article focuses on the 12% without taking into account the context. Latter point is a bit 'bear shits in forest'.
(, Tue 13 Mar 2012, 10:46, Reply)
What's going on in those sample breakdowns with high cholesterol %?
I know they controlled for this, but this confused me. Am I being an idiot?
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prince-igor si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses, Tue 13 Mar 2012, 11:01,
Reply)
Are you talking about table 1?
I think that's just demonstrating the demographics (which would include high cholesterol).
Gah - you've just drawn my attention to the massive confounder which they dealt with badly - ethnicity. They just divided it into 'white' and 'everyone else' :/
(, Tue 13 Mar 2012, 11:13, Reply)
Lols.
Was aware it was just demographics, but why are those who eat least meat those with highest cholesterol, before they cancel for it.
This puzzles me, but it's not really my field so I may well be being incredibly stupid, as already stated. Is there some reason why this would be?
Oh, and "white" versus "the rest" is indeed a bit dumb, especially when dealing with diet and nutrition innit? It's one of those things where there are significant genetic differences...
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prince-igor si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses, Tue 13 Mar 2012, 11:34,
Reply)
I'll have to read the study again re cholesterol
They may have not made it explicit either, which would be another thing.
re ethnicity - I suspect that they never had the data :)
(, Tue 13 Mar 2012, 11:51, Reply)