[dmix]

"The China Study" was very famous but also pretty notorious for selling the idea that illnesses like Cancer exploded in China after their recent economic boom in the 90s-2000s, pointing to the rise in meat consumption as the source. That's about as observational/macro of a propositon as it gets. Especially with all the other stuff like mass urbanization.

This review explains both the book and the science better than I could

https://www.redpenreviews.org/reviews/the-china-study-the-mo...

[fl0ki]

Not to mention that Hong Kong tops the list of both meat consumption and life expectancy, despite similar demographics, genetics, urbanization, and economic development to modern mainland China.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8406509/

The world gave us a free control group for the China study and people still conveniently overlook it.

[DickingAround]

Sadly, that's still very non-causal. A lot of things in China were happening at the same time. We just need to be honest that we don't have causal data and we have to make decisions on correlation data (and not try to over-claim causal testing).

[wslh]

Scientifically speaking, and only based on your assertion, you can also have the hypothesis that changing the Chinese diet has an effect on them specifically.

In Argentina people ate red meat on a daily basis and I don't think there is a strong study talking about their relationship with cancer in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s... I see [1] but, fingers crossed, I know only one case of colon cancer in my Argentinian circle and other cancers comparable with what I see in my US circle. The study has only 296 patients and 597 control subjects. Also the study points about the cooking style of the meat.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maria-Lantieri/publicat...