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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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It's funny how most real scientists highly respect epidemiology—the field that uncovered the harms of smoking, forever chemicals, thalidomide etc.
The company dupont had to confess and pay a hefty fine for poisoning the planet with pfas chemicals. Clearly they aren't as smart as carnivore influncers.
Why don't they hire some lawyers to hand wave and ignore observational studies because they are "weak evidence" or bad science?
Maybe smoking is good too because it helps you lose weight, reduce anxiety and issues like ibs. You can do a 30 day test and see it for yourself.
If you find epidemiology compelling I invite you to read - https://discuss.online/post/40722935 - Animal Based Food Beneficial Epidemiology List
I'll check them out.
But my initial thoughts are that those are highly cherry picked (and probably funded by meat companies, I have to check) and that the highest quality epidemiological studies like Framingham show eating plants is way better for heart and brain in the long run.
YES! All epidemiology is bullshit, by its very nature - the vast majority are cherry picking and polluted by confounders. However, if your standard for compelling evidence is epidemiology you have to account for every study going against your hypothesis.
Why do you consider this epidemiology better quality then other epidemiology? It generates a hypothesis that needs to be tested! It has just as many confounders! If you rate quality by alignment with a pre-existing bias, you have to be aware of it.
You have to look critically at every study - In what population? In what metabolic context? Enumerate every confounder, every "controlled" variable that has assumptions baked in. Realize FFQs are highly unreliable.
I don't consider epidemiology to be bs or just hypothesis generating as do most scientists.
It finds subtle long term trends that are too impractical to find with other methods like RCTs. So if a lot of high quality epidemiology says saturated fats increase heart disease risk by 20-30% over decades then I will likely believe it. Just like it found a trend with smoking.
The same reason why any experiment can be better quality and well respected than others. You should look at a study's design, strengths, weaknesses etc and evaluate it.
Let me ask you one question back. Do you consider astronomy or evolution to be bullshit too because they are based on observation as well?
That is a curious statement, science is a procedure that requires falsifiable and testable hypotheses.
Ok, so your appealing to consensus? But that is fine for personal beliefs, however, there is evidence supporting saturated fat for long term health.
Agreed, a observational study cannot establish cause and effect - by design.
Astronomy has testable falsifiable hypotheses. As does evolution. You build a model and see if new data you didn't train on fits the model. With plant based nutritional epidemology, people reject new data by leaning things like 'a lot of high quality epidemiology says' and ignoring that contradiction of the model.
These are not impossible things to test. We did it in the 1960s.
I fail to see how epidemiology is different from any other branches of science. Apart from all the successes I mentioned it has done a great deal in understanding infectious diseases.
With better data you can overthrow any theory or hypothesis. I don't think anyone thinks the consensus view cannot be changed or plant based results from epidemiology are unfalsifiable.
Great, it does come across that way some times.
falsifiable hypothesis and interventional experiments would be a good start.
thanks I am familiar enough with falsifiability and interventional studies to understand what you mean.
As I said I have carefully studied epidimiology and it's historical successes. And I have directly experienced how the branch is viewed in the communities of actual scientists. I trust their judgement more than some health influencers and guys on the internet obsessed with spreading carnivore diet.
I don't think we'll make much progress here. I'll go with carnivore diet bad.
I post the actual papers you know.... Let's take a single issue we discussed, saturated fat and cardiovascular outcomes - I've posted this paper, but here it is directly https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.05.077 Saturated Fats and Health: A Reassessment and Proposal for Food-Based Recommendations: JACC State-of-the-Art Review
How does your reading of consensus based epidemiology reconcile such analysis?
Totally fair, I'm not trying to recruit you!
Fair enough. You do seem well read. I'll check out that paper and some of the other things in your community sometime.