usernamesAreTricky

And their expectation was a 400% increase too!

The question science isn't ready to answer

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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

usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

Also for people who prefer roasted, but don't want to go through the effort of waiting for an oven to preheat: using an air fryer has changed how I cook vegetables. It's amazing how "what if we made a convention oven, but smaller" is actually really helpful because it heats up super fast. Very convenient to roast them with an air fryer and very tasty

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

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

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

This is an article that talks about multiple studies with differing methodology, including one new one. Posting without reading the article does not help actually advance discussion in general. Posting without reading just reaffirm existing beliefs

For instance, the new study itself did not use the term "plant heavy", they looked at different sub groups

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

I was overusing them before too :(

Hypothetically have had to be told that three em dashes is too many in one sentence by someone proofreading. It's just such a good punctuation. Alas

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

As a long time fan of the em dash, it is truly a tragedy that using it is associated with AI. I was heavily using it before LLMs were a big thing. It allows spacing in contexts where commas and others just won't let you. Am I to just incorrectly use a hyphen instead? Horrible 0/10

usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

Datacenters for AI are delaying, but not stopping the closure of fossil fuel plants. They are still like ~5% of total US electricity demand and forecast to maybe be 10% by 2030. Sure, that increase is certainly not great (data center power demand was flat until recently), but it's also not something that's going to make progress impossible either

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

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

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

More modern research does not suggest this made up most of the consumption for humans even before agriculture. For instance,

Our results unequivocally demonstrate a substantial plant-based component in the diets of these hunter-gatherers. This distinct dietary pattern challenges the prevailing notion of high reliance on animal proteins among pre-agricultural human groups

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

Does the Lemmy post title not have "in mice" in it for you? I added it to the title of the post to clarify this. It should show as

Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in study on mice

Whereas the original title of the article was:

Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

My point is that it was way more rare than what people's diets look like today. Not zero but not dominant. Wide reliance on plants is even true before modern agriculture. For example:

Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

Humans historically, also didn't eat much meat up until very recently. More recent research suggests our ancient human ancestors were eating far more plants than meat

EDIT: For example:

Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

Not that useful in scenarios besides reading: if you curl your hands in front of your eye and leave a very tiny opening you can create a pinhole that'll make a tiny bit of your view in focus

Photo from Minute Physics demonstrating what you need to do for that:

https://youtu.be/OydqR_7_DjI

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usernamesAreTricky @lemmy.ml 3个月前

Heat treating the flour isn't too hard though in good news. Here's one recipe that mentions how long to do that for