Reminds me of when the WHO declared meat as a carcinogen. Pretty useless information. If you actually follow their advice, you'll likely just be switching to something that hasn't been studied as much.
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...
But if you would like to own the vegans, you're more than welcome to eat hot dogs all day, every day, exclusively and we'll see what happens.
To my point, the FAQ you linked has the question about whether eating fish or poultry is better to which their answer is : "The cancer risks associated with consumption of poultry and fish were not evaluated."
As I remember the announcement it was "meat", though it's totally possible it was "red meat" and I just remembered it wrong. Though I specifically tried to find more information about why they classified it as such, and which studies they relied on, and there was no information to be had, certainly not the FAQ you linked. The only thing they had was about a two sentence announcement declaring it as a carcinogen.
Well, it's useless if you don't read past the headline. But the link between eating red meat and colorectal cancer has been established for what, decades? So I fail to see what you're arguing against. If I were to "follow their advice", I'd be eating a vegetarian diet, which I'm pretty sure has been studied plenty.
People take different imperatives away from the same information.
What does it mean that red meat causes cancer? Does that mean that all things being equal, high quality red meat should be avoided? Does it mean that red meat is associated with other lifestyle factors that cause cancer? How well controlled are the variables? How was the meat cooked? All red meat, or just certain levels of leanness? Did the diet of the animal matter? What about their location? Was the meat itself tested for contaminants?
In most nutrition studies, the controls are extremely difficult to put in place, especially for things like cancer, because the tail is so long. Studies are almost exclusively observational in nature, relying on recall and cohorts that do or don't eat red meat, which has SO much selection bias associated with it.
Even if you got to the end and could say definitively that high quality sourced red meat is still carcinogenic in all of its possible cooked forms, that still isn't "advice." There are still benefits, and those benefits carried by something like red meat, and those benefits might outweigh the risks.
You ask a number of questions which the WHO has already answered. I don't think you tried very hard to find information. You can read the original monograph:
https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/m...
Or if you want a more approachable layman's explanation:
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...
In some cases the answer will be "we don't know". You had best get used to that.
Eat a bit of everything in moderation, drink water and exercise. Be vegetarian if it's an ethics thing. No need to overthink it.
And as a public service reminder: HN is not a single hive mind.