A new study investigates the link between processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, and trans fatty acids, to diseases such as cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
But I’ve started to get into learning about it in the last few months.
It’s really starting to feel like this is a giant bullshit field, and as much as they are trying to find useful results, there’s something severely wrong with how they seem to arbitrarily assign causality and correlation.
In a contrived example: “People who live near power lines have more cancer” - “No, poor people live near power lines because they’re poor, and poor people have more cancer”
What are the kind of people that eat processed hot dogs? I can promise you they are not millionaires. I can promise you it’s not people who can afford filet mignon but decide to have a steamed hot dog. It’s not people who work out and take care of their bodies. It’s not people who cook.
So when a study is done like this, what answer are you actually getting? probably finding out that the type of people who eat processed meat are more prone to these conditions for a variety of considerations that are just totally left out of the analysis.
I actually don’t think it’s possible to forget. In the sense that pattern recognition and chain-of-event are thought structures baked into our very beings. We don’t intuit that most things are random in a greater sense, and probabilistic on a finer resolution. We’re always looking for self-satisfying, singular paths of causality and they don’t exist.
Touch red hot metal burn skin; Stab self in face make self not alive. A necessary abbreviated thought structure essential to human survival.
Extend that perspective to eat ween get beetus. Wait.
What is the field of nutritional epidemiology hoping to accomplish by obsessively searching for links (their magic word) between disease and dietary intake? It assumes, by the very nature of the question, that there is a direct causal relationship between diet & illness. There can’t be. Any sufficiently complicated system of interrelationships is going to have massive amounts of turbulence and chaos!
The EMF from power lines was a real mind virus that went around when I was a teenager!
I’ve been alive too long and have seen this pattern play out again, and again, and again. Feeling a little sad right now, actually.
For another example: all my life the common sense accepted wisdom, supported by real dermatologists was that to keep the likelihood of skin cancer to a minimum there is zero known healthy level of sun exposure. Well that’s all out the f’king window in 2025 because we now know the deleterious effects of insufficient sun exposure are vastly more severe compared to an increased morbidity for types of skin cancer.
I don’t want to be mr critical, but… there’s something wrong in our whole approach to these “studies” and I don’t know what fixes it. Any experts wanna help describe what I’m getting at with the right technical language?
Yes, poor people eat poor quality food more often but the food is bad either way.
Here’s a good tip, look at allllll of the specific foods that a doctor would tell a pregnant person to avoid. Non-pregnant people should also avoid them, and processed meats have been on that list for a long time.
that’s not true. pregnant people are told to stay away from sushi because of immunity with raw fish. you should also not eat papaya while pregnant because it can cause premature contractions. you’re making a very broad generalization that the recommendation to pregnant people is completely nutrition based, but there’s many factors when growing a life inside you.
like in early pregnancy, you eat foods high in choline. that’s not because foods low in choline are bad for you, but because during early fetal development, choline builds neural tubes
Sure there are exceptions. You haven’t made any point about whether processed meats cause poor health outcomes though. They do, and its been shown over and over again, but people don’t like someone telling them they have bad habits.
that’s not the point i was addressing in my comment though, i agree processed foods a very bad. and poorer people are more likely to eat them. there’s no debate there from me.
i was only addressing your broad generalization of looking at all food doctors recommend for pregnant people to avoid. while it does include lots of bad and unhealthy foods, these recommendations also include foods that are directly related to fetal development, hormone changes, etc
I’m not a nutritional epidemiologist.
But I’ve started to get into learning about it in the last few months.
It’s really starting to feel like this is a giant bullshit field, and as much as they are trying to find useful results, there’s something severely wrong with how they seem to arbitrarily assign causality and correlation.
In a contrived example: “People who live near power lines have more cancer” - “No, poor people live near power lines because they’re poor, and poor people have more cancer”
What are the kind of people that eat processed hot dogs? I can promise you they are not millionaires. I can promise you it’s not people who can afford filet mignon but decide to have a steamed hot dog. It’s not people who work out and take care of their bodies. It’s not people who cook.
So when a study is done like this, what answer are you actually getting? probably finding out that the type of people who eat processed meat are more prone to these conditions for a variety of considerations that are just totally left out of the analysis.
We have collectively forgotten that correlation != causation
I actually don’t think it’s possible to forget. In the sense that pattern recognition and chain-of-event are thought structures baked into our very beings. We don’t intuit that most things are random in a greater sense, and probabilistic on a finer resolution. We’re always looking for self-satisfying, singular paths of causality and they don’t exist.
Touch red hot metal burn skin; Stab self in face make self not alive. A necessary abbreviated thought structure essential to human survival.
Extend that perspective to eat ween get beetus. Wait.
What is the field of nutritional epidemiology hoping to accomplish by obsessively searching for links (their magic word) between disease and dietary intake? It assumes, by the very nature of the question, that there is a direct causal relationship between diet & illness. There can’t be. Any sufficiently complicated system of interrelationships is going to have massive amounts of turbulence and chaos!
Basically: wanna live healthy and forever? Just become a billionaire! If you don’t want to live healthy then I guess that’s your choice to make.
Well, you’re right and I’m surprised I’ve never thought of this before.
The EMF from power lines was a real mind virus that went around when I was a teenager!
I’ve been alive too long and have seen this pattern play out again, and again, and again. Feeling a little sad right now, actually.
For another example: all my life the common sense accepted wisdom, supported by real dermatologists was that to keep the likelihood of skin cancer to a minimum there is zero known healthy level of sun exposure. Well that’s all out the f’king window in 2025 because we now know the deleterious effects of insufficient sun exposure are vastly more severe compared to an increased morbidity for types of skin cancer.
I don’t want to be mr critical, but… there’s something wrong in our whole approach to these “studies” and I don’t know what fixes it. Any experts wanna help describe what I’m getting at with the right technical language?
deleted by creator
Yes, poor people eat poor quality food more often but the food is bad either way.
Here’s a good tip, look at allllll of the specific foods that a doctor would tell a pregnant person to avoid. Non-pregnant people should also avoid them, and processed meats have been on that list for a long time.
that’s not true. pregnant people are told to stay away from sushi because of immunity with raw fish. you should also not eat papaya while pregnant because it can cause premature contractions. you’re making a very broad generalization that the recommendation to pregnant people is completely nutrition based, but there’s many factors when growing a life inside you.
like in early pregnancy, you eat foods high in choline. that’s not because foods low in choline are bad for you, but because during early fetal development, choline builds neural tubes
Sure there are exceptions. You haven’t made any point about whether processed meats cause poor health outcomes though. They do, and its been shown over and over again, but people don’t like someone telling them they have bad habits.
that’s not the point i was addressing in my comment though, i agree processed foods a very bad. and poorer people are more likely to eat them. there’s no debate there from me.
i was only addressing your broad generalization of looking at all food doctors recommend for pregnant people to avoid. while it does include lots of bad and unhealthy foods, these recommendations also include foods that are directly related to fetal development, hormone changes, etc
Try to follow the thrust of the conversation.