"For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life" - Peter Cleave, Surgeon Captain (1906-1983)
We can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 2.0, and when estimates are much below 2.0, we are simply out of business. Epidemiologists have only primitive tools, which for small relative risks are too crude to enable us to distinguish between bias, confounding and causation" - Shapiro 2004
Oftentimes, the WHO/IARC report on red and processed meats and cancer is cited by those advocating vegetarian diets for health improvement. Usually, however, it is ignored that this report identifies meat as a hazard and not as a risk (an important distinction, of which the importance is explained elsewhere on this website). But the problem…
