Davis wants you to partake/indulge/gluttonize (I think u will take your pick it is safe to say) of products that show a 17% increase in Cardiac problems and Cancer, based on:
1. 17% more Cancer and HD is a small difference..
2. The factors that could have caused the difference are most probably hidden. i.e. piggybacking lifestyle factors such as more meat, the more booze and sin, cigarettes, sedentary behaviour etc..
3. The effect of meat eating was offset by fiber intake.
1 is dangerous. 17% given that it is only an observational study is what is called a smoking gun. It is very hard to measure quantities and over a large amount of time.
2. is highly assumptive. To ignore the primary factor is perhaps dangerous as well. To make up probable other causes is not required. Granted your have to rule out other factors. More study, but preliminary indictions are troubling. And this is the result of 100 studies, actually the real number. Not 1. So 100 times more troubling, wouldn't u say?
3, And how pray tell do we know that? That fiber is offsetting If it were, then meat is more dangerous. Of course it makes intestinal flora not the least effect is to make b12 which is vital. Meat per se in small quantity all other toxins being equal is probably not a loaded gun, but given the country information, amounts matter.
The subject dances around well known facts. Vitamins and pro anthocyanidins are contained in vegetables and fruit. Without such micronutrients we quickly succumb to malnutrition. Given our 3 squares, without micronutrients but with sufficient calories, we starve to death in less than a year. Without vitamin b12 we live only 5 years. The discovery of micronutrients such as bioflavonoids and sterols was made from about 1938 to 1945. Their importance was not realized until after the war. It is a fact, if u don't eat your vegetables and u don't avoid overcooking some of them sonny, u gonna die.
The danger in telling people that meat is fine, eat all u want, we made a big mistake is we never made any mistake in the first place. And we eat far too few vegetables. And the monogram u wrote is right in one respect only a very difficult and very long term controlled clinical trial could establish the right and wrong of it. So in the absence of this we must observe and tease out factors from existing populations as finely and precisely as we can. Factor analysis on 60 factors for such a population can burn out a million computers over year of computing. But the data must also be correct. The country observations constitute 138 or more imperfect control groups. We can collect the data and we must do a better job. It is difficult. But broad correlational patterns can be seen, that defeat confounding factors to a degree because we can know the agricultural practices, toxins in food very finely by test. Amounts can be guessed at fairly well. From that alone we know the correlation of meat intake and Cancer in general. It is far greater than 17%. IT is 100%. The more meat u eat the more Cancer u get. Plain and simple. What are the mitigating factors? Well that is a study as well, isn't it. I never said it was over, but the meat gun is on fire, it ain't just smoking. |
