Oddbean

Actually that was a great resource. I looked up all the names of people who promote this diet to find out when they died, so I could calculate all-cause mortality of people promoting carnivore versus people promoting any one of (mediterranean, vegetarian or vegan). Most are still alive (and young). This "study" of mine suffers from selection bias. I have to pick people who are known, known to have strongly promoted and followed the diet, and who died, and we know what age they died at (the reason they died is not included because that is too easy to fake or lie about or requires us to investigate uncertain causal links -- even when we know it was a car accident for example). I'm happy to add more people if they are famous and the data for them is published, it's an open ongoing study. To counteract my selection bias, I encourage you to point me to more Carnivore people who lived long, or more Vegetarian people who died young. But they have to be famous known people who publicly promoted the diet. I added my ancestors to the vegetarian list even though they don't fit the criteria, because their data doesn't actually change the number much (makes it slightly lower) and it just makes it more certain for me that this isn't some mistake. Carnivore (this group just started with your data, thank you): Owsley Stanley: 76 Vilhjalmur Stefansson: 83 Barry Groves 77 Walter L Voegtlin 71 Blake F Donaldson 73 Atkins 72 Dr. Alfred W Pennington 56 Charles Poliquin 57 Average: 70.625 Mediterranean, Vegetarian or Vegan: Dame Harriette Chick 102 Caldwell Esselstyn 90 Blackburn, Henry 97 John Harvey Kellogg 91 Ancel Keys 100 Jack Lalanne 96 Nathan Pritikin 69 Jeremiah Stamler 102 Ellen G White 87 My G. Great Grandma Gass 99 (SDA vegetarian) My Great Grandma Paxton 89 (SDA vegetarian) My Grandma 79 (SDA vegetarian) Average: 91.75 Seems like the carnivore people die 20 years younger.

There are studies with half a million people that show higher mortality rates for red meat consumers. Been around for a while. My problem with those studies is that they don't mention anything about sugar consumption.

It is not practical to do an RCT on long-term diseases. We know the reverse causation hypothesis is not true: that dying young causes people to eat meat earlier in their life. So the only other hypothesis that I'm aware of is that some third factor causes people to both eat less meat and to live longer. That is called a confounder. And epidemiologists have nightmares about the confounders that they didn't think of. There are always unknown unknowns, so we can always be wrong. But proof isn't what we should be looking for because science doesn't give that anyways. We should look at the weight of the evidence and decide what seems most likely. My read of the evidence is that it is highly likely that high meat consumption causes shorter lives, and even probably because of the saturated fat and not from something else. That is, I believe it is highly likely that coconut oil would do the same thing. BTW: in studies on atherosclerosis in animal models, do you know what the standard method is to create a rat or mouse with atherosclerosis is so you can do an experiment on an atherosclerotic animal? It is to feed them coconut oil.

However, unlike all the other studies you don't have to trust the researcher on this one. Some people are hyper-skeptical of science. So by having a study they can check for themselves, it might actually mean more to them.

All pre industrial tribes passed their genes thanks to animal products. Price went on an expedition upon the invention of modern air travel to find and study primitive peoples, their diets, and the effect of modernized foods (i.e. 100% non animal foods). Price hypothesis was that in some corner of the Earth there is a superior vegan diet. https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91I7wBR067L._SL1500_.jpg