February 20, 2017

Meat for men?

Q: It’s nice to see a balanced nutrition story in the Herald today, isn’t it?

A: Um.

Q: They talk about benefits and drawbacks of a vegan diet.

A: Um.

Q: It’s impressive that just one serving of butter a day can double your risk of diabetes, isn’t it?

A: <sigh>

Q: Isn’t that what the research paper says?

A: It’s a bit hard to find, since they don’t link and don’t give any researcher names.

Q: Did you find it in the end?

A: Yes. And that’s not really what it found.

Q: Is this the weird yoghurt thing?

A: Yes, that’s part of it.  They found a higher risk in people who ate more butter or more cheese, a lower risk in people who ate more whole-fat yoghurt, and “No significant associations between red meat, processed meat, eggs, or whole-fat milk and diabetes were observed.

Q: That doesn’t sound like a systematic effect of meat. Or animal products.

A: And there wasn’t any association at the start of the study, only later on.

Q: So it’s eating butter in a research study that’s dangerous?

A: Could be.

Q: Ok, what about the bit where men need meat for their sons to have children?

A: No men in the study

Q: Mice?

A: No, smaller.

Q: Zebrafish?

A: Smaller.

Q: Um. Fruit flies?

A: Yes.

Q: Do fruit flies even eat meat?

A: No, there wasn’t any meat in the study either. The flies got higher or lower amounts of yeast in their diet.

Q: But don’t vegans eat yeast?

A: I’m not sure that’s the biggest problem with extrapolating this to Men Need Meat.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »