I think this thread is a good idea. The only question I have for the mods is can it be sealed with all the covid-deniers, anti-vaxxers and malaria-drug advocates inside, and then dumped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Yours for a better world.
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Actually one of the best places to be now.
For many reasons.
The words âcovid-deniersâ, âanti-vaxxersâ and âmalaria-drug advocatesâ are banned in this thread. They are emotive nonsense that stifle debate. If you donât have any facts to bring to the table, you can continue with that sort of thing in the other threads.
My thead, my rules.
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Haha I respect that.
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Itâs a brave try, OP, but itâs never going to work.
Just another Covid thread.
It could work if every post had to have something factual that could be discussed reasonably. Perhaps a statistic with a degree of validity.
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I wonder how many Amish are overweight, old, diabetic, smokers, or otherwise have underlying chronic health conditions? It seems to me their lifestyle could easily have some effect on mortality ratesâŚ
Reading the AFP fact check, it seems healthy living is indeed mentioned as a cause, and also your characterization of the article is hilariously inaccurate. Iâm glad there is a dedicated thread for this topic.
I found this:
ââŚthe Amish still have a significant edge in late-life health, with lower rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and more.â
âonly about 4% of Amish people are obese, compared with 36.5% of the overall U.S. population.â
Whole (2018) article is interesting.
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Why do you think my characterisation of the AFP fact check is inaccurate?
My take on it is:
- Nobody really knows how COVID has affected the Amish because nobody has bothered collecting data ⌠and since theyâre somewhat secretive about their affairs, itâd be quite hard to find out.
- The COVID death rate for Ohio (most of the Amish live in Ohio) is about the same as for the US at large.
- To the extent that we know anything at all about the Amish and COVID, they appear to just get COVID and then recover, presumably because theyâre mostly healthy. So perhaps there are fewer of them dying than elsewhere in the US. Or perhaps there arenât. We just donât know. AFAIK the Amish (unlike, say, âLatinosâ) are not routinely monitored for health statistics as a distinct racial group.
My point here is that you canât definitively âfact-checkâ something when you donât actually have any solid facts to offer. This is a pretty common problem with media fact-checking.
Pessimism is also banned in here, unless itâs pessimism about the state of the World, in which case go right ahead.
So far so good, I think. Even yyy is getting into the spirit of things, although I suspect weâll soon wander off into a debate over the meaning of âisâ.
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Iâm going to give Finley a break to settle into his kingdom for a bit and then bamâŚ
Forumosa chaos is going to break out again. 
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We know that they like to keep socially distanced from âthe Englishâ
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I think Iâve found the study theyâre referring to:
Iâll try to keep this factual, but almost everything that dietitans publish is complete bollocks, and frankly this looks like more of the same. Here are the issues as I see it:
The research appears to have an agenda (as opposed to a hypothesis) viz., to show that âlow-carb high-proteinâ diets are bad, and vegan diets are good. There are two massive problems with this:
- There is no single entity that you could describe as a âvegan dietâ or âplant-based dietâ, just as there is no single entity called a âcarnivore dietâ. There are fat, diabetic, unhealthy vegans for the same reason that there are fat, unhealthy, diabetic carnivores: itâs possible to construct a crappy meal with or without meat, and vegans often do. To hypothesize that there might be more differences than commonalities between those two broad groups suggests an a priori assumption that meat-eating is the root cause of ill-health.
- There is no such thing as a âlow-carb high-proteinâ [low-fat] diet, except in the imaginations of dietitians. Unfortunately, a few people hear the phrase and attempt to eat that way; they usually give up pretty quickly because you feel like youâre dying (I know this because I tried it many years ago). The correct term - âlow-carb high-fatâ [moderate protein] - doesnât accurately describe the typical low-carb meal, which is in fact âplant basedâ. This means their tick-the-box survey is going to be highly confusing to participants.
Their selection method for subjects is ⌠a little odd. I canât even begin to unravel the confounding factors theyâve introduced there. IMO they would have done better to just recruit people from the population at large and use a longitudinal design, but that would have required a lot more effort ⌠not least because very few people develop moderate-to-severe COVID, so theyâd need tens of thousands of subjects.
The questionnaire design isnât fully disclosed. However we should note that questionnaire design is notoriously difficult, and self-reporting is so prone to various biases that the results are usually too full of noise to be useful, unless the effect being observed is very large.
Participants had 11 choices: whole foods, plant-based diet; keto diet; vegetarian diet; Mediterranean diet; pescatarian diet; Palaeolithic diet; low fat diet; low carbohydrate diet; high protein diet; other; none of the above.
One question? With only those options? Why not ask people what they eat? I suppose I would have ticked âlow carbâ, but I would not have done that had I known that they intended to do this:
Lastly, we combined âlow carbohydrateâ diets and âhigh proteinâ diets into another category (âlow carbohydrate, high protein dietâ, n=483)
Because I do not belong in that category.
And yet, apparently, they have detailed knowledge of what people ate - so I suppose they must have collected some supplementary information, but the questionnaire isnât published. Nor is the raw data.
Among COVID-19 cases, individuals who reported following plant-based diets consumed more total vegetables, plant proteins (legumes and nuts), and less poultry, red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and alcohol compared with those who did not follow plant-based diets (table 2).
OK. But now we (potentially) have multiple hypotheses or a multifactorial analysis - was it poultry? was it vegetables? was it sugar? - which means the study is hopelessly underpowered. Theyâve tried to work around this by splitting people into two completely arbitrary groups, where the dividing line is going to correlate strongly with healthy-user bias.
Why go to all the trouble of creating a complicated questionnaire and then combining things according to your personal biases, if your hypothesis is that meat-eaters develop more severe COVID? Why not just ask people one question: how often do you eat animal products, and how much?
Which brings us to the biggest problem of all, which is common to a lot of nutrition work: there is no stated hypothesis. You need a hypothesis (a) to inform the experimental design and (b) to make the statistical analysis robust. What weâve got here is yet another draw-the-target-around-the-bullethole exercise.
So what about the result? I doubt it means very much beyond what we already know: people who have metabolic syndrome are at considerably higher risk from COVID-19. Since metabolic syndrome has nothing to do with how many vegetables you eat, or how much meat you eat, vegans and carnivores develop metabolic syndrome at more-or-less the same rates:
Which suggests that whatever the explanation for the observations here, itâs unlikely to be a cause-and-effect consequence of veganism per se.
Given the methodological errors, this little footnote is not particularly surprising, and suggests that the assertion made in the abstract is not justified:
However, the association between low carbohydrate, high protein dietary pattern was not statistically significant in model 1 (p=0.13), model 2 (p=0.13), or model 3 (p=0.14).
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OK this is a promising statement.
One day I will win an IgNobel for my paper, âNutrition science and bollocks: an intersectional approachâ.
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I would think about the vegetarian/vegan thing this way. People that are vegetarians often tend to put more energy and time into learning about what they eat. I think, if that idea holds any weight, it would be mor be causethey tend to care more about what they eat and.thus tend to eat less garbage like coke and doritos. If we are just broadly thinking of western cultures. On the other side, the no carb all proteins crowd is very similar but a different angle. They also tend to think more about how they eat. However i bet vegetarians outnumber the meat eaters by a large number. Then there is the majority that dont care or have no education in food related issues.
Plus there is a huge range of vegetarians. Taiwanese vegetarians and vegans (more the religious types, not the healthy living types) tend to eat pretty poorly. Very oily, highly processed foods all the time (noodles, tofu etc) and many end up having serious health issues. Caused by diet? Thats the argument almost no one can win. But surely diet is a huge part of the bodyâs health.
Im a veggie. As soon a i get covid will let you know. However, i dont buy things made in ChinaâŚ
Exactly. The term is almost meaningless. I know several vegans and vegetarians; some of them are healthy, some are unhealthy (one or two disgracefully so). The reason is really quite obvious: you can make junk food without meat, and people who eat junk food tend to be unhealthy. I thought it was quite funny that @yyyâs video included a shot of soybeans: the modus operandi of the food industry generally is to make human food out of the same stuff that they make pignuts from, ie., grains and soy. Almost all processed foods are based on these.
I donât have any problem with people going vegan/vegetarian for ethical reasons, but I donât see any need for these endless âstudiesâ trying to prove that meat is inherently bad for you - they invariably show no clinically-significant difference, even if they occasionally come up with a statistically-significant one. The upshot of decades of research is that vegans and vegetarians die of about the same things as meat-eaters, at about the same age, and suffer from the same sort of ailments (with some minor differences).
Even allowing for the dubious characteristics of industrially-produced meat, thereâs no obvious biological reason why animal products would harm human health. To the extent that these studies ever find a measurable difference, it invariably boils down to this:
