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Comment by mchannon | Hacker News Reader

A lower T/S ratio is associated with advanced age (had to dig hard to find that one- check out page 9 of this paper: https://www.rug.nl/research/genetics/students/internships/an...). In other words, high T/S = good.

As far as statistical correlation, the p-value of 0.02 (lower, and further away from 0.05, is better) is pretty strong.

Where this article fails to convince me to start waving red meat in the faces of all the vegs I know is the limited sample size of a couple dozen people. Maybe there's some protective factor in red meat, or maybe their small sample size just overrepresented young carnivores and old vegetarians.

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The small sample size is what most concerns me. Just from personal observation I have no doubt that genetics play a huge part in all of this, part that's hard to believe could be accounted for in a study of 28 people.

Yes sample size is ridiculously small. Also, I couldn't find anywhere how they actually selected these individuals. i.e. it doesn't seem this was a random double blind study

Also the suggested causal association "unexpected effect of red meat" would need a lot more controls to figure out. There could easily be several confounding variables here.

This study should be replicated with n > 200.

If not several thousand

What is statistically special about 200?

Doesn't a sample size need to be at least 30 to be statistically significant?

If the effect was detectable in the small sample, in a 8x larger sample it should show up clearly.

If it is a statistical artifact, of course it won't.

P value is a measure of statistical significance. Sample size doesn't matter as much as most believe, as long as your p value is really low.

P values can't save you if the number of diverse subpopulations in the general population is larger than your sample size. Also, they break the two dozen people into many groups, so they've implicitly tested many hypotheses.

Even if they did the stats right, there can be hidden causality at play with samples this small. Maybe 100% of the people that don't eat red meat in their sample grew up in poor households with poor nutrition, or maybe they all live in the arts district, which is close to an industrial polluter.

Anyway, it looks like it is worth further study with larger samples, but I don't think you can draw any actionable conclusions from the current study.

I'm still confused, so red meat gave you a higher T/S ratio, aka, they say red meat is good for you?

Even if this were a good study, you couldn't conclude that from it. The conclusion would be that red meat consumption is somehow associated with longer telomere length.

Some have speculated that extending telomeres or preventing them from shortening over time can reduce some of the effects of aging, so a diet that preserves telomere length might be good for you, but that also remains to be seen.

I don't think the study is very useful because they were essentially just data mining a tiny sample for any kind of apparent correlation from 10+ variables and found one that's barely statistically significant (although the effect size looks substantial, if real).

Why barely significant?.02 p value is pretty high

It's high (or low) enough to use the word "significant" and look for supporting evidence in future studies.

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