> and most of the positive associations observed for meat consumption and health risks were substantially attenuated after adjustment for body mass index (BMI)
> higher BMI accounted for a substantial proportion of these increased risks suggesting that residual confounding or mediation by adiposity might account for some of these remaining associations
The numbers in the abstract should control for BMI (but not adiposity, i.e. bodyfat percentage). They're probably also too high.
To clarify: I'm 100% in agreement with you. I think meat gets a bad rap for bad reasons (one of them being bad science). I just wanted to point out this study did some effort (even if they could have done more) and that does deserve to be said.
One problem some studies suffer is over-control of confounding variables, which excludes secondary causal relationships. For example, if you control for health of arteries, you will find that (insert bad food here) known culprits for heart disease stop causing heart disease -- which would seem absurd. That's because artery health and heart disease are correlated (in this case causally related), so when you control condition one on the other, any causes vanish (completely or partially).
In this case in particular they control for BMI. If eating less meat is helpful in lowering BMI, this effect isn't captured by this result. So you have to watch out for this when taking conclusions from a study or making decisions (if you already have a low BMI then you can trust the conclusions better).
> and most of the positive associations observed for meat consumption and health risks were substantially attenuated after adjustment for body mass index (BMI)
> higher BMI accounted for a substantial proportion of these increased risks suggesting that residual confounding or mediation by adiposity might account for some of these remaining associations
The numbers in the abstract should control for BMI (but not adiposity, i.e. bodyfat percentage). They're probably also too high.
To clarify: I'm 100% in agreement with you. I think meat gets a bad rap for bad reasons (one of them being bad science). I just wanted to point out this study did some effort (even if they could have done more) and that does deserve to be said.