[mikestew]

Reminds me of when the WHO declared meat as a carcinogen. Pretty useless information.

Well, it's useless if you don't read past the headline. But the link between eating red meat and colorectal cancer has been established for what, decades? So I fail to see what you're arguing against. If I were to "follow their advice", I'd be eating a vegetarian diet, which I'm pretty sure has been studied plenty.

[jcutrell]

The problem is, it's _not advice._

People take different imperatives away from the same information.

What does it mean that red meat causes cancer? Does that mean that all things being equal, high quality red meat should be avoided? Does it mean that red meat is associated with other lifestyle factors that cause cancer? How well controlled are the variables? How was the meat cooked? All red meat, or just certain levels of leanness? Did the diet of the animal matter? What about their location? Was the meat itself tested for contaminants?

In most nutrition studies, the controls are extremely difficult to put in place, especially for things like cancer, because the tail is so long. Studies are almost exclusively observational in nature, relying on recall and cohorts that do or don't eat red meat, which has SO much selection bias associated with it.

Even if you got to the end and could say definitively that high quality sourced red meat is still carcinogenic in all of its possible cooked forms, that still isn't "advice." There are still benefits, and those benefits carried by something like red meat, and those benefits might outweigh the risks.

[asfgidonhio]

I don't understand what you're complaining about. The finding that red meat is probably carcinogenic isn't advice and doesn't pretend to be. The evidence isn't that strong and the WHO goes out of its way to acknowledge that. They have done everything they can to put their findings in context so people can understand them. Would you have preferred they not publish at all?

You ask a number of questions which the WHO has already answered. I don't think you tried very hard to find information. You can read the original monograph:

https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/m...

Or if you want a more approachable layman's explanation:

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...

In some cases the answer will be "we don't know". You had best get used to that.

[belval]

Which ties in to a larger topic in nutrition science, which is that ultimately the research quality is so poor that health risks from deviating from the more historical diet are likely higher than the benefits from jumping on every superfood and banning "bad" foods from your diet.

Eat a bit of everything in moderation, drink water and exercise. Be vegetarian if it's an ethics thing. No need to overthink it.