Americans Who Ditched Meat Significantly Reduced the Risk of Developing Cancer, New Study Finds
Americans Who Ditched Meat Significantly Reduced the Risk of Developing Cancer, New Study Finds
I've expressed some caveats to just citing the figure from this study before in another thread (hi, Sunshine lol), but overall yes, even without this study, there's robust evidence for double-digit reduced risk of CHD and overall cancer in plant-based diets compared to omnivorous ones. A recent meta-analysis for example shows a 15% reduction to overall cancer incidence risk, and even a substantial reduction in a vegetarian diet from an omnivorous one.
And to be clear, the evidence from this study is good. This isn't "study bad"; it's just primary medical literature that needs to later be interpreted by experts through things like meta-analyses.
Edit: Also, please don't take jet seriously below. All they do here is spread pseudoscientific nonsense about a diet with proven major health risks and no clinical evidence of benefits. This is akin to someone who believes vaccines are linked with autism evaluating a vaccine safety study. Neither you nor I nor especially they are qualified to interpret primary medical literature like this. Please just wait for the meta-analyses that include this study in them and leave it at that; we should want to be involved in science, but we should also acknowledge our own limitations and avoid the Dunning–Kruger effect. That's why I, a mod at /c/vegan, am not sitting here shitting my pants over this study that says vegans have a 24% lower cancer risk. It's cool, but I want to wait for people more qualified than I am to interpret it.
Please Try to focus on the scientific aspects and refrain from making overly partisan or inflammatory content. Our aim is to foster a respectful environment where we can delve into the scientific foundations of these topics.
Editing your comment to include a attack on someones character is inflammatory.
This is not about your character. It's about your beliefs being incompatible with modern medical science. You mod this public health community but have pseudoscientific beliefs which are diametrically opposed to a modern understanding of public health. Attacking your character would be to say you're doing this out of malice or baselessly accusing you of shilling. I believe you believe this, and I believe that if you believe a Western pattern diet is killing people (it is; this is the main thing we agree on), it shows strong ethical character to try to warn people about it. What's problematic is that your solution to it is so divorced from science that people who just read comments and nod along because they sound plausible need to be aware of the lens you're interpreting this study through.
The actual study Longitudinal associations between vegetarian dietary habits and site-specific cancers in the Adventist Health Study-2 North American cohort
I've ranted about my Standards for Nutritional Evidence before, but here are the major issues
TLDR: It's a interesting study, it is hypothesis generating and should be used for further science or to design a interventional study, it should not be used to inform on personal health choices, it simply does not have the power or the rigor
Don't you think calling a proportional hazards model "guessing" is doing a disservice to Lemmy posters here? Not everyone has a background in statistics, and honestly quite a few people here struggle with highschool math. It's not much different than linear regression. Its fancy linear regression, not fancy guessing.
Does their model not fit or something?
At its most essential level - when you have a epidemiology dataset you don't know the relationships until you analyze the data, in order to make controls for some factors in the data you have to assume some relationship for that factor. It's typically assumed to be some linear relationship. If you knew the relationship between factors with certainty, you wouldn't need a epidemiological dataset in the first place, but since we are trying to control for a confounder by definition we don't know the relationship. It is a guess in colloquial terms, a educated guess to be sure, but still a guess.
This is a good overview of cause and effect in inferential statistics, and confounders (start at the 5 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4YV7tEtg3I
If you prefer something written with more rigor: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4017459/
the researchers should notice that wrong assumptions about the form of the relationship between confounder and disease can lead to wrong conclusions about exposure effects too.
This is a critical weakness of epidemiology when inferences are made about something not directly measured.
Thanks for the leg work of getting to the actual study instead of "science journalist" often incorrect or misunderstood understanding of things.
“science journalist” often incorrect or misunderstood understanding of things.
I think they understand perfectly, the study is just a talking point for some agenda. If the journalist was interested in science they would have mentioned some of the things I did.
I don't think you read that whole part of the study. The direct follow-up to that reads: "Validation of the dietary habits was primarily by comparison with 6 24-h dietary recalls administered by telephone in a representative validation subgroup (1100 participants)." (Per the methodology section.)
From there, I'm not going to discuss the other points because I know neither you nor I are qualified to interpret primary medical literature; we should leave that to the experts, and I'm not going to fan the flames of this by doing something I'm not qualified to do. But I can objectively point out that your last bullet point is highly selective and misleading. I can also point out for readers at home that "Compares only against the standard American diet*" isn't necessarily true? You're assuming omnivorous Seventh day Adventists generally follow that diet similar to the general population, and moreover, you subscribe to a pseudoscientific diet which is notoriously even less healthy somehow. There is no reason people should trust you to interpret primary medical literature when your qualifications are that you follow and advocate a diet which the medical community considers deeply unscientific and very unhealthy.
I'm not sure where you got the term "SAD" from, but it's generally called the "Western pattern diet".
The direct follow-up to that reads: “Validation of the dietary habits was primarily by comparison with 6 24-h dietary recalls administered by telephone in a representative validation subgroup (1100 participants).”
Yup! But they were validating the globally administered FFQ, so that doesn't change the rigor of the data, just the confidence in the FFQ.
I know neither you nor I are qualified to interpret primary medical literature; we should leave that to the experts, and I’m not going to fan the flames of this by doing something I’m not qualified to do. But I can objectively point out that your last bullet point is highly selective.
I am trained in the maths, so I can speak to the weakness of the signal here.
Did you happen to look at my post on standards of evidence? I welcome feedback, and I know you do care about data and science even if we disagree on diets, so I would appreciate your thoughts. https://discuss.online/post/25820268
Hey no fair updating your post with insults after I responded nicely to you.
can also point out for readers at home that
Your just grand standing, you don't want to talk to me about what I wrote at all.... That is a bit rude.
There is no reason people should trust you to interpret primary medical literature when your qualifications are that you follow and advocate a diet which the medical community considers deeply unscientific and very unhealthy.
That is just an appeal to consensus fallacy, anyone who wants to learn more is welcome to discuss, ask question, etc at !carnivore@discuss.online but that has nothing to do with this post at all. My analysis of the posted study does not rely on my personal dietary choices.
I think it was based on AHS-2 - https://adventisthealthstudy.org/studies/AHS-2
90k people, only one FFQ administered at the 2-3 year mark, no FFQ followup. The study started in 2002-2007; So we are 23ish years into the study and the last FFQ was done 21 years ago.
It is a confounder that really does need to be highlighted when examining the publications.
I just see this as american meat being a bad thing. glad I don't/won't eat it
Msleading title: the study didn't look at switching, just at correlations in the population.
And being vegan/vegetarian also correlates with wealth. And wealth correlates with lower rates of disease.
So yeah unless we get longitudinal studies I wouldn’t read much into these population wide correlations.
You can see my comment below on interpreting primary medical literature, so I'm not going to argue for the merits of specific claims about health based on this study. What I will address is what makes you think this study isn't longitudinal when it's called "Longitudinal associations between vegetarian dietary habits and site-specific cancers in the Adventist Health Study-2 North American cohort"? I'm also perplexed what you think "longitudinal study" means as it pertains to wealth.
There are dozens of meta-analyses broadly confirming a reduction in chronic disease with vegetarian and vegan diets if that's what you're interested in. There's so much that this particular study barely makes a dent except for the novel association between PBD and a reduced risk of lymphoma. (This still needs to be shown in meta-analyses, so it doesn't matter much.)