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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

"Dozens of peer reviewed, exhaustive observational studies told doctors that hormone replacement therapy reduced the incidence of heart attacks. "

Then they weren't exhaustive were they? Virtually nothing is proven ever. In fact, nothing is absolute except abstract mathematics. When there are numerous studies showing a correlation then we can feel somewhat confident in it. When we then look at disease rates in societies that do not eat me and see a clear correlation between meat eating and heart disease then we can feel even more confident.

Also remember that in the china study the group that got more disease (and ate more meat) got roughly the same amount of exercise and had roughly the same lifestyle. This isn't absolute proof, but nothing is every absolutely proven. I always find it fascinating that there is such a knee jerk reaction to this issue.

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My "knee jerk reaction" is simply that there isn't enough evidence to provide real nutritional guidance. The types of studies that need to be done have not been done.

And the fact is, there are not numerous studies consistently showing a correlation, there are many studies that do not show that those who eat more meat get more disease. For example, Cretan villagers have lower heart-disease rates than even the Japanese and eat diets consisting of 40% fat. The "French Paradox" is so termed because the French eat high quantities of animal fat but have low heart disease. Tokelauan's, who had a diet high in fat (50% fat) and saturated fat (90% of the fat they ate was saturated), were relatively healthy. After migrating they consumed much less fat and had higher heart disease.

In other words, there's a lot about diet we don't understand yet and you can't boost the relevance of epidemiological studies by saying that "virtually nothing is proven ever" and therefore we should just accept observational science, when it's known that epidemiology has significant flaws as anything other than a hypothesis generator.

the cretan diet is low in meat and the fat mainly comes from olive oil. This is an example that supports the correlation with meat and heart disease.

Now onto the french paradox. First, you again are conflating fat with meat. They aren't the same so at this point you seem to be pushing an agenda through bait and switch.

"French people get up to 80% of their fat intake from dairy and vegetable sources ... The principal aspects of this diet include high olive oil consumption".

There is plenty of evidence and there are some outliers. Using outliers to claim that the abundance of evidence doesn't exist is disingenuous. Also, the american diet is terrible for other reasons such as the high consumption of highly processed foods. One can certainly find people that eat a lot of meat, but little processed food, and show that it's a healthier diet compared to one of highly processed foods. This doesn't mean that a diet low in meat and processed food isn't healthier, and in fact we there is a good deal of evidence showing that it is.

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