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91·2 months agoI get that this is more tongue and cheek, but for some perspective it’s around ~21% of US adults that are functionally illiterate (in English) from 2024 stats
2·2 months agoDon’t see a paywall on my end, but https://archive.is/VKgxt should work
Not the person you originally replied to, but eating plants directly would at least be a sort of harm reduction in that case. It takes a lot more plants to raise non-human animals than to just use plants directly. This is also a big part of why the environmental impact is so high for meat, dairy, etc.
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
I assume you are referring to the consumer reports headlines, they have been greatly misleading. They have been using an extremely low level as their bar for concern. Here’s a recent piece talking about that
This is an unachievable safety target, significantly below the lead you get from average daily food consumption
[…]
But compared to the FDA’s more realistic numbers, 6.3 micrograms is 71.6 percent of the reference level for women of childearing age, meaning it’s safe even for at-risk individuals. For adult males, who are more likely to glug protein shakes, the risk is negligible. Children, with some exceptions, shouldn’t be consuming protein powder at all
[…]
And it bears noting that Consumer Reports’s tests showed levels of lead that were higher than tests of Huel carried out by the National Sanitation Foundation, an independent testing body, which showed that a serving of Huel Black came in under 3.6 micrograms
(https://archive.is/y6ZHk for paywall)
The question science isn’t ready to answer
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Maybe worth reminding her of that option too. A lot of people do things for culture because they feel like they are required or supposed to, even if they might feel better not taking part in certain practices
If I were to hazard a guess, I’m going to imagine that this won’t completely solve the feeling bad/guilty about it aspects. Another option to consider: can always just have something else
It’s very much human to have those feelings and healthy in the short term to have those feelings, but we should generally try to listen to them or they eat away us. Or in the really cheesy way of putting it “listen to your heart”
We can still fight back on the state level. States and local levels will lead the way for progress here
California got a state law to enforce net neutrality in 2018. This is a good part of what limited the damage of Trump overturning it the first time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_Protection_and_Net_Neutrality_Act_of_2018
Local & state level is where a lot of the progress will live on in the near future. Call your local legislators & vote in every local election - they are way more frequent across the country than you may realize
Did you read the original study here at all?
If you want to make the arithmetic faster for any number, (n+1)*n / 2 is the closed form expression for summing the (whole) numbers 1 to n
So (8+1)*8/2 = 36 in this case