New smoking

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guitarplayer
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New smoking

Post by guitarplayer »

Reading studies on the short- and long-term effect of eating meat and dairy on the body, it strikes me how meat and dairy consumption resembles tobacco consumption. For example, consumption of both increases chances of cancer later in life. There are also studies on health effects of fumes from living in neighbourhoods where there are many restaurants cooking meat (compare to the passive smoker phenomenon).

It makes me wonder if the meat and dairy industry is on a similar trajectory to that of the tobacco industry some decades back. Also from the point of view of making bets on the market, and utilizing emerging patterns.

What are your thoughts?

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Jean
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Re: New smoking

Post by Jean »

Meat, (and dairies to some extent) have been consumed for much longer time than tobacco (which in the cigaret form is a very modern thing).
For this reason, i don't see it going away.
wasting crops that are good for human consumption to feed cattle might stop though.

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Re: New smoking

Post by jacob »

More likely that a lack of fertilizer (phosphate and methane feedstock to Haber Bosch) and regional food crises will make livestock an increasingly risky proposition because of how inefficient production of meat and dairy is from a calorie/water/protein-conversion basis. Of course financial risk can be mitigated but that's not cheap and insurance money is only useful insofar it actually buys food.

Another way of seeing it is that there are 7.9 billion humans ... and a corresponding 24 billion "livestock" (insofar they were converted to human bodysize). (The amount of two and four legged land animals mass distribution between humans, livestock, and wildlife is a 3-6-1 ratio.) This means for each billion humans added, we need to add 3 billion livestock equivalent just to keep the current trend. But there is only room for 8 billion more (about 2 billion humans and 6 billion livestock) by eliminating the remaining wildlife. Unless cheap mineral and energy sources are found, the current trend does not have much volume left in it. At least in terms of percentages, increasingly fewer humans will be able to afford meat---perhaps they'll be bought out by those who can afford to run the grain through their pigs and cows and instead be forced into malnutrition.

This is the only trend I see. I don't think the actual risk influences human behavior as much as the perceived risk. (We're more afraid of flying than driving. More afraid of terrorists than unsecured furniture.) For example, lack of exercise is also pretty (comparably?) "deadly", but will there be a trend towards more jogging? I think not.

chenda
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Re: New smoking

Post by chenda »

Smoking became stigmatised partly because it became associated with lower class culture. Affluent people tend not to smoke because its more culturally taboo.

Meat consumption though might go in the opposite direction and become a luxury item like shellfish and cavier, a sign of affluence. Or possibly go the other way and become stigmatised due to environmental costs.

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Slevin
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Re: New smoking

Post by Slevin »

Bias up at the top for consideration: I don't eat meat or animal products myself, and my partner is a plant based advocate trying to move people towards a more sustainable (and ethical in her and my opinions) diet. So we talk about this stuff a fair amount in my house, and part my partner's paid job is to read and condense outcomes of research papers around similar topics.

I'm a big fan of Nutrition Made Simple for breaking down a lot of the big subjects in nutrition and trying to look at the bigger picture of a Preponderance of evidence (hyper orange / maybe also some yellow?) . I think there's a good scientific argument that red meat is consistently associated with higher cholesterol levels and higher incidence of chronic heart disease, and I think that is generally how the evidence plays out. Don't eat a lot of red meat, and if you do, try and stick to the lower fat cuts. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ56uOk ... eSimple%21 and references, especially the conclusion. In some people, it is likely a thing you should avoid. With others (and especially in moderation), it's probably not the straw breaking the camel's back.

Now if we move over to fish, I think the preponderance of evidence comes out the opposite. It may be unhealthy for some individuals who already have accumulated risk factors (high cholesterol, diabetes, etc), but to most people it ends up having neutral or slightly positive overall effects. May update this later with links on studies if I can find where I have them all.

I'm unfamiliar with significant health risks coming out of eating leaner meats. Might be the case, might not, just not something I've read a bunch of abstracts / outcomes about.

I'm not too familiar with dairy explicitly from a health perspective, but looking at the papers coming out from the adventist study is showing some cancer protective outcomes and other cancer risks. The North Karelia Project reduced cardiovascular disease outcomes by a drastic margin, and a lot of that was removing dairy products, but also very high red meat intakes. So its a little too intertwined to give us a specific outcome.

Overall health wise, I think the preponderance of evidence is showing us a more healthy diet consists of a lot of plants (veg, fruit, soy, corn, whatev), seeds, nuts, unsaturated fat oils being fine if you are relatively healthy, and fish and the leaner white meats if you want.

Ecologically, I think meat and livestock raising will always have a place in the margins (marginal land thats not fit for ag), and wouldn't want to give a one-size-fits-all solution anyways. There will always be individual variation, and more closed systems often include chickens or goats or other animals that can also turn waste into compost / foodstuffs.

So from an attractor point of view, no, I don't see eating meat and dairy disappearing anytime soon, but from a global perspective and energetic perspective (jacob covered above), as more and more farmland becomes marginal (unfit to grow crops) to use for animal feed, I would expect a shift to lower meat consumption, but driven more by prices and availability and sustainability than health risk.

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Re: New smoking

Post by WFJ »

guitarplayer wrote:
Thu Jun 09, 2022 2:57 am
Reading studies on the short- and long-term effect of eating meat and dairy on the body, it strikes me how meat and dairy consumption resembles tobacco consumption. For example, consumption of both increases chances of cancer later in life. There are also studies on health effects of fumes from living in neighbourhoods where there are many restaurants cooking meat (compare to the passive smoker phenomenon).

It makes me wonder if the meat and dairy industry is on a similar trajectory to that of the tobacco industry some decades back. Also from the point of view of making bets on the market, and utilizing emerging patterns.

What are your thoughts?
What studies? Sugar/corn syrup consumption is similar to tobacco, but not meat and dairy. Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks, Monster Beverage, Dutch Brothers are on a similar Diabetes lawsuit path.


WFJ
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Re: New smoking

Post by WFJ »

I would suggest reading "Cult of Statistical Significance" before accepting all academic studies as some kind of proof. Articles are blocked, but assume most would not stand up to simple data mining suggestions covered in below book.

https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Statistical ... 0472050079

Most fields now have published papers in this regard as p-values are easily manipulated with large datasets.

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Slevin
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Re: New smoking

Post by Slevin »

Links should be fixed now.

Yeah a single scientific study can be wrong and problematic, i.e. each study is a pixel not a picture, but when you have many higher quality studies stacking up in a certain direction, you are starting to get a bigger picture. I.e. a preponderance of evidence. The picture is never "perfect" agreed, but you explicitly asking for scientific studies and then blithely dismissing them without looking because "statistics" seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater in a way that I'm having a hard time interpreting as anything except disingenuous. More complicated / complex things are harder to determine (i.e. human health) than things that follow trends 100% of the time (i.e. physics), but the solution to the postmodern condition is not to throw out science; it is to understand the inherent limits in science and human ability and move forwards with tools we have and a better understanding of them and their limits. Dismissing larger scales of evidence with "some statistical errors have been made in the the way data is processed by some parties" is outrageous without digging in case by case.

Tl;dr, none of these studies is a "proof" because there is no such thing as a proof when it comes to things like nutrition and human health (due to individual variation and the fact that risk factors are not exactly useful to individuals, i.e. not all smokers get lung cancer). At best we get general trends and can say that certain factors increase risk of certain health problems, but these are not usually guaranteed to show up in any one individual.

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Re: New smoking

Post by chenda »

What actions can we take to reduce the coming global famine ?

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Re: New smoking

Post by jacob »

chenda wrote:
Fri Jun 10, 2022 1:02 pm
What actions can we take to reduce the coming global famine ?
You mean personally or collectively?

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Re: New smoking

Post by chenda »

jacob wrote:
Fri Jun 10, 2022 1:19 pm
You mean personally or collectively?
Mainly personally, other than reducing meat consumption.

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Re: New smoking

Post by jacob »

chenda wrote:
Fri Jun 10, 2022 1:23 pm
Mainly personally, other than reducing meat consumption.
For first-worlders, the initial COVID lockdowns provide a valuable lesson --- but figure it will go on for longer (6-18 months). Empty shelves in supermarkets starting with what people know to cook (milk and toast bread). Then moving to increasingly more esoteric ingredients as people scramble to learn how to cook: Starting with shortages in flour, yeast, pasta, canned tomatoes and canned beans---the main ingredients in home cooking 101---and quickly moving to CSA subscription openings. Eventually vacuuming up produce and bread staple sections leaving condiments and standing in first-come-first-serve lines to get whatever is available this week.

As caloric supply chains get more constrained, farmers may start slaughtering livestock ironically making meat cheap---this is what happened when water was short in the Midwest US in 2012.

As always, there's a solution that's cheap ($), good (taste/nutrition), and easy (order it online); pick any two.

Cheap and good: I favor keeping a 3-6 month supply of grains/legume stables in 5 gal buckets with gamma seal lids. I've talked about this many times before on the forum. We've also dug up 3/4 of our backyard lawn to grow vegetables (we may of course have our own local famine). Can and freeze the surplus. This is obviously not easy and it's not a skill one just "picks up". For us it has been a 5-10 year [so-and-so] effort getting to our current level. Could go faster if made a priority (see AxelHeyst's ERE journey for example).

Good and easy: There are suppliers selling freeze dried and canned food. This is quite expensive. Random link: https://www.costco.com/xmre-blueline%c2 ... 58381.html ... It could be argued that it's not very good either. At least insofar you want to recover the outlay because it requires spending a year eating freeze dried food. The bar is relative though. If one is used to preprocessed food, it might be a step up?

Cheap and easy (the default choice that eventually will be blamed on someone else as usual): The most likely first-world experience of a food crisis will be an unwelcome diet of "eating less of whatever is available" therefore forcing a 20 pound weight loss, which given first-world BMI levels would actually do most people some good. Maybe that'll create some sympathy with the poor-world too as things will be much worse there.

guitarplayer
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Re: New smoking

Post by guitarplayer »

Thanks all for your thoughts and bringing my lofty parallel down to earth, need more empathy in seeing how people see things. My thinking was along the lines of what @jacob mentioned about 'deadly' effect of lack of exercise - obvious and one would want to err on the side of caution.

I posted this in the money section because wanted to bypass the health discussion around meat and dairy. Clearly I need some more insight into how markets work, but the picture comes across of perhaps the structure of the meat and dairy market changing with no apparent monetary decline until a hard stop is put (plumbing breaks).

Thanks again!

P.S. @chenda, my blanket answer would be that engaging in ERE2.0 is a pretty decent way of contributing to reducing the coming global famine et al.

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Re: New smoking

Post by chenda »

jacob wrote:
Fri Jun 10, 2022 2:30 pm
Thanks Jacob, yes indeed. I'm hoping rising fuel prices will be another nail in the coffin for car culture.

@guitarplayer - yes. Patronising local producers as well seems worthwhile, something I did a bit during lockdown.

Dave
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Re: New smoking

Post by Dave »

While I used to think like the OP, I no longer do. The comparison between meat and cigarettes is not apt.

A fairly short response to a really big subject:

1) There is evidence that humans have been evolving towards meat consumption for something like 1-2M years to the point where some argue meat consumption may have played a pivotal role in what made humans human (brain size rapidly increasing around the time we began eating meat, and actually shrinking the last ~50,000 years as large game has been killed off and we have moved more agrarian/carbohydrate heavy). This is based on "real science". You see this in things like a relative increase in the size of the large vs. small intestine, appearance of enzymes in our mouths, and the low pH of our stomachs relative to other primates. Obviously we are omnivores, can eat anything, and we still have similar characteristics (relatively long small intestine for fiber, teeth, etc.) like other primates, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been a directional shift.

2) There are cultures and individuals that have lived for their entire lives or large periods of their life on predominantly animal based diets while demonstrating good health. This passes the common sense test since the only food that humans could have eaten all across the globe during all times of the year is animal foods - you can't find bananas, kale, black beans, broccoli, flax seeds, tomatoes, quinoa, and strawberries in the arctic or most areas all the time. Our predecessors may have lived in some places where a broad selection of plant food would be available much of the year, but a large portion of our species left such areas and moved on a long, long time ago, and dietary patterns shifted accordingly.

The ability to survive and be healthy on a extremely narrow animal food based diet is in stark contrast to a plant based diet where to thrive you need a tremendous variety of types of food that simply wasn't available for the vast majority of history (with its lack of industrial farming and fossil fuel distribution), not to mention the necessary supplementation most people need on a plant based diet.

2) 100% of the evidence supporting plant based diet's superiority in promoting longevity are based on epidemiology (meaning observational, not interventional research, which of course they almost have to be), which is not proof of a causal relationship, but a starting point for further investigation given the limits of this type of research. Further, many other similar studies from outside the West (and even recently the West, too, as narratives have shifted) showing the exact opposite conclusion (https://www.dovepress.com/total-meat-in ... ticle-IJGM). The argument is that the "mountain of evidence" supporting WFPB diets is heavily biased by healthy user and unhealthy user bias - in Western countries people following meat guidelines had money and access to healthcare, exercised, worked in safe environments, didn't use drugs in excess, and those who didn't care to follow those guidelines were those of the opposite type of folks. It's not that they ate meat, it's that they ate cheeseburgers, French fries, milk shakes, didn't exercise, partied hard, ignored the doctor, and so on.

3) Regarding meat and cancer, I urge you dig a bit more deeply into the WHO/IARC's "research" into that topic. It has been heavily criticized by objective (i.e. not the collection of ethical vegans who reached the conclusion) scientists. This pattern of ethical vegans advocating behaviors they believe in through the lens of a health/athletic/other narrative shows up across a number of nutritional topics and results in extremely one-sided views that don't conform with reality. The Game Changers documentary is a great example of pushing a belief system by claiming it's better for athletics on the flimsiest of evidence, misrepresented evidence, and then you not shocking some of the subjects reverted back to their pre-plant-based diets after suffering issues or reduced performance.

4) Many of the articles you posted show a relationship between red meat and "CVD markers" like LDL, and that relationship, in the absence of additional nuance like metabolic health/insulin sensitivity, has become challenged. Even the influential Framingham Heart Study shows that, when segmented by HDL, those with high LDL and high HDL show a low incidence of cardiovascular events (whereas those with high LDL and low HDL do have a high incidence of events, noteworthy as HDL is correlated with insulin sensitivity). Similarly when you look at those with high LDL but no arterial blockage as measured by a CACS, there is very little chance of cardiovascular events (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamane ... i4.twitter).

Point is, many of those studies just show what they claim: more meat -> higher LDL. Do you know what the #1 killer of vegans is? It's still CVD. You don't get that impression from folks like Dr. Greger, just that eating meat is going to blow up your heart because look your LDL goes up. Conflation.

5) And ultimately, even if you reject all of the above, there is a significantly lower relative risk (in these epidemiological studies) of meat eating relative to cigarettes for both cancer and (IIRC) CVD, which is in of itself enough reason to seriously question the claims that it's actually the cause in the context of the myriad changes in the diet such as processed foods/higher refined carbohydrate intake/increased seed oil consumption.

But if you just look at the numbers, you'll see you really cannot equate the two as being anywhere remotely of the same order of magnitude.


This is a big rabbit hole and I don't intend on spending time debating this as dietary habits are almost religious to many people, but it's fairly off base to imply the health impacts of the two are similar.

To the question about markets, ironically the government regulation (outlawing the marketing of cigarettes, effectively stopping any new would-be competitors in their tracks) contributed (in addition to the stocks trading perpetually cheaply, perhaps because of many peoples' aversion to sin stocks) to tobacco companies being among of the most profitable stocks over a very long period of time. Supply reduced more than demand, no marketing costs, pricing power -> near monopoly -> $$$.

I think that over time non-"health" factors as discussed above by @jacob are likely to play a bigger role in the dynamics of the meat industry, but I'm speculating.

Recent meat trends are mixed globally. In the West meat consumption has been flat or declining slightly, but in developing countries it's the opposite. One item of interest is that red meat consumption has been falling in the US for something like 50 years which ties back to @WFJ's point about sugar and corn syrup. Not such a convenient point for those claiming red meat is a/the primary cause of all these problems when its consumption has fallen while refined carbohydrates and seed oil consumption has increased and these problems are not going away.

guitarplayer
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Re: New smoking

Post by guitarplayer »

Hey @Dave, thanks for chipping in with your thoughts, I will look up the RRs for smoking and and meat consumption.

ETA: @Dave, definitely, ORs for smoking and various of cancers are 20 to 100+ fold that of e.g. colorectal cancer and meat. Thanks for pointing this out.
Last edited by guitarplayer on Mon Jun 13, 2022 2:25 am, edited 2 times in total.

Dave
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Re: New smoking

Post by Dave »

Hey guitarplayer, I started typing my response before I saw your last post before mine , so didn't mean to dive into something you weren't intending. I'm not sure the analogy between the two industries works for health reasons, but it might for the other reasons.

There are some large meat public companies in various parts of the meat supply chain like Tyson, JBS, Hilton Food Group, and others. So you can play it multiple ways. I looked into Hilton Food Group at length in early 2020, and would caution care in trying to play into the trend as dramatically different dynamics are at play for different companies.

I'm admittedly biased in that I think micro often trumps macro, but in the case of a company like Hilton Food Group you could see the primary/current end market shrinking while seeing the business rise due to geographic expansion (rising meat consumption outside of primary Western Europe/Australia markets), growth in meat market share of grocers vs. independent butchers, growth in market share of packaged meat vs. store butchered meat, taking market share from other processors and gaining scale efficiencies, expansion into adjacent plant-protein markets, and more.

At a broader level, the relative market share of various types of meat has waxed and waned, as well - as I said above beef consumption has generally lost share for a long while now, but poultry has increased.

It's tricky!

Some market participants have compared fossil fuel companies to tobacco, which seems to bit better to me. I am not comfortable extrapolating current trends long enough for a valid DCF model, but there is a similar dynamic at play with fossil fuels in 1) demand that is likely to decline over time, but it's not dropping off a cliff while 2) new supply is not being brought online quick enough to meet said demand, resulting in 3) falling volumes yet rising prices such that actual earnings (which are revenues - costs) climb over time. Couple that with share prices that could trade low due to ESG factors, and you get favorable current yields and a growing earnings stream. Altria is up something like 71,000% since 1981 while per capita cigarette consumption is down 44% and total consumption down even more.

All of that is speculation (and the clear difference of selling a global commodity like oil with volatile prices is an important one compared to cigarettes with literal price floors), but it's an interesting topic of how to play various sorts of trends. What matters is the relationship between where demand and supply shake out, not simply changes in demand.

In other words, being too quick to go short a declining industry is seemingly the opposite problem of being too quick to go long a growing industry, but both follow from the same failure to consider supply side changes.

That's where I'd direct my attention if considering such investment.

Scott 2
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Re: New smoking

Post by Scott 2 »

Ignoring the diet debate, I'd agree sugar sellers - especially cola - are the most likely to hit a tobacco scale lawsuit. There's a combination of marketing to kids and health damage that looks very similar. IMO - refined sugar is much closer to a drug, like alcohol or caffeine, than a food.


I do wonder if meat substitute providers displace processed meats. Fast food burgers. Breaded chicken sandwiches. Tacos. Hot dogs. Nitrate heavy sandwich meat. Etc. There's an economy of scale and subsidies to compete against, but I think the products are mouth feel competitive. We're already seeing Impossible and Beyond Meat make inroads in restaurants, though typically as a premium product.

Investing in a specific company, on the other hand, much less confident in that. Beyond meat dropped their fake chicken strips roughly 10 years ago. They were great. The company has grown, and is publicly traded, but who's to say they'll win? Impossible is privately held. Looking at the investor list, they certainly have the right support. Arguably the better fake beef, as well.

WFJ
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Re: New smoking

Post by WFJ »

Didn't read all above, but there is no impending famine, have you been to a Walmart recently? The average person is fatter than King Henry VIII, enough calories to live for years with only water. Vegans have this delusion to impose their dietary habits on everyone. If you are healthier eating like a rabbit, do it yourself. I'll stick with mammal evolution and eat meat and be happy to compare health outcomes with anyone (just had a physical, all metrics in the green).

Fentanyl and Corn syrup responsible for 1000X more negative health outcomes than meat and dairy.

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