this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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Just ask the carnivore diet lemmy.
Reporting in!
The observational weak relative risk studies can be pumped out infinitely, they do not inform on cause and effect sadly. The best data we have of prewesternized cultures eating meat heavy diets shows no incidence of cancer in these populations (first tribe nomads, inuit, etc). Humans have been eating meat for at least 2.5 million years, yet cancer has only jumped up to the epidemic it is today in the last 150 years. Something in the environment and diet has changed, absolutely. What is the causative factor? The anti-meat papers with weak relative risk tells me that its not the meat, we should be looking for a very strong signal (50% of people born today will have cancer in their lifetimes - 150 years ago basically nobody got cancer).
I could speculate, and I have my own theories, but we are looking for a significant change in the last 150 years as our culprit. Meat is not a new invention. Processed food, fructose, sugar, industrial food oils, pesticides in the food supply - all have bloomed in the last 150 years, I would hazard a guess and say these are the real harbingers of modern disease we need to focus on. Curiously these epidemiological food questionnaire papers don't look at these factors, maybe because its hard to fill in a survey for sugar (its in all processed food).
Life expectancy in 1875 in the USA was 39.41 years. The vast majority of cancers will not cause significant illness (or show up at all) in population groups that die of other disease/injuries before 40 - so, handwaving away the studied correlative links with cancer in population groups today that eat a lot of meat just because 'people ate red meat 150 years ago and they didn't get cancer' is what scientists call 'illogical'.
And that's completely ignoring the fact that we have far advanced medical technology in the last 150 years so we are actually diagnosing more cancers because we're finding them when they are smaller and more treatable (that's a good thing).
This is true, but this is the mean. This includes everybody who dies in childhood. If you made it to 10 years old you are likely to live until 60.
https://www.infoplease.com/us/health-statistics/life-expectancy-age-1850-2011
This is exactly why the office of the President requires a minimum age of 35. It wasn't because they were going to die in 4 years, it was because they had the expectation they had lived for a lot longer.
Why would we rule out all the kids under 10 from the life expectancy stat? To skew it older just to make it seem like people lived longer back in 1875? We don't do that with life expectancy stats now, the life expectancy for 2020 is 78.81 and yes that includes anyone unfortunate enough to die as a child or infant. It also doesn't mean that anyone who is 74 will be dead in ~4 years, it's an average - which is helpful when talking about large demographics (which we are).
Wtf does the president have to do with anything lol. They only pick presidents over 35 "because they had the expectation they had lived for a lot longer". So.. They expect that people who are older than 35 have lived longer than those who are under 35? Um yes that is how the passage of time works.
I'm not sure how this helps the discussion.
The value of seeing how long adults live tells us alot about our history. If we know historically adults could live into old age we can learn about disease progression over historical records as well as from archaeological bone surveys.