People ought to be much more focussed on including foods in their diet rather than excluding them. Vegetarianism, veganism, raw-foodism, they’re all defined by what one doesn’t eat rather than what one does, and that’s not sufficient for a healthy diet. Fear of contaminants regardless of level plays into this.

Besides specific medical issues, I think folks on those kinds of diets would benefit from occasional cheating, provided they do so intelligently. It’s a way of hedging one’s nutritional bets. If you’re a vegetarian, eat some Alaskan salmon occasionally. If you’re doing Atkins or paleo, eat a slice of whole-grain bread or some pasta once in awhile.

“Q. Some vegetables contain nitrites, do they cause cancer too?

A. It is true that nitrites are commonly found in many green vegetables, especially spinach, celery and green lettuce. However, the consumption of vegetables appears to be effective in reducing the risk of cancer. How is this possible? The explanation lies in the formation of N-nitroso compounds from nitrites and amines. Nitrite containing vegetables also have Vitamin C and D, which serve to inhibit the formation of N-nitroso compounds. Consequently, vegetables are quite safe and healthy, and serve to reduce your cancer risk.”

I agree with your point.  They should just quit now.  Or better yet stop writing journal research reports as fact and do the hard work of performing a clinical study. This is the SAME Willet using the SAME test group to show that estrogen lowered heart disease. What did the followup clinical studies show? That it actually raised heart disease. Has Willett ever been right?

Really, there’s a lot wrong with nutrition research, but it pales in consumption to the horribleness that is nutrition research reporting, and the researchers are largely to blame. The lead of the Harvard study told a reporter, for instance, “When you have these numbers in front of you, it’s pretty staggering.” This is irresponsible. The responsible thing to say is “We don’t understand why we got the results we did, or if there were other factors that we didn’t control for. Our study shows that it’s extremely importent to do experimental studies to determine the effects of different types of meat on health.”

And that’s really what it comes down to: experimental studies. You can do observational studies all you want, but that’s not going to get you answers, just point you at interesting questions. We have the military, we have prisons, we have public schools, we have nursing homes. All of these are places where you can do AB studies on real people and draw real conclusions. You don’t need to do anything approaching immoral. All of these populations are eating crap food anyway, almost anything would be an improvement. Change their diets and see the results. Hell, for most of them, you can do longitudinal studies spanning years. Instead, we continue to throw money at inexpensive observational studies that give us the same questions we’ve had for decades. 

The causal connection between meat consumption and mortality was already proven.  What the newly published study attempts to do is quantify the degree of risk.

Having spent some time reading and thinking about the original article by the Harvard researchers  (http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/archinternmed.2011.2287 ), including reading some of the cited prior and supporting research, I have some concerns about one of the issues Blum raises:  unreliability of self-reported food consumption.   But it’s my assessment that, if anything, the results were affected by under-reporting  of all foods (including red meat) by some participants, which would have served to understate the impact of avoiding meat.   My reason for suspecting under-reporting are the low daily total calorie averages for those in the low meat consuming quintiles.   If these quintiles were compromised of a combination subjects who actually omitted meat from their diets and some who just misreported, the effects of meat avoidance would be attenuated.

But the big picture that Blum seems to completely miss is that the Harvard article is based on the analysis of over 100,000 study participants over more than 20 years.  These are huge numbers, against which Blum approvingly cites nostrums from skeptical journalists like herself that we should take the findings “with a grain of salt.”   

Like others, I had trouble finding the links to the articles and blog posts Blum references, but I did read the one Blum says “eviscerates” the Harvard study at “Mark’s Daily Apple.”    That author did a decent job on food consumption mis-reporting (coming to similar conclusions as I do about the direction of  bias), and even seemed to somewhat understand the “fancy pants math tricks” the Harvard researchers used to control for confounding variables and covariance of things like meat consumption and smoking.   But he/she ultimately dismisses the Harvard study on the basis that “observational” studies are weak and unpersuasive.  I guess the whole field of epidemiology should just quit their jobs right now.   

And I suppose we ought to reject the conclusions of the IPCC as well, as all they’ve done is identified observed correlations between GHG concentrations and temperature . . .. if they really want to prove the AGW hypothesis, according to Blum and Mark’s Daily Apple, I guess we’ll need a double-blind controlled trial with two earths, etc.

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Processed meat is usually red meat preserved via smoking, curing, or salting and it includes many favorite American foods in addition to bacon:

Ham
Sausage
Hot dogs
Bologna
Salami
Pepperoni
Pastrami

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/can-bacon-be-part-of-a-healthy-diet

I do know pigs are often used for carcess study ballistics and the like due to similar body size (citation needed.)

That’s the point, I think. While bologna is obvious, not all of it is.

http://bit.ly/FRRNUp