Animal protein is highly inflammatory. This is about the worst thing you can do if you are concerned about inflammation. Load up on fresh vegetables and fruits instead.
This has been my take away as well. There are plenty of these sorts of studies that don’t rule out meat, but show a clear damaging effect from red meat. Often, they mention leaving in a little serving of low fat meat. It’s probably more to leave people the option of some meat as opposed to making a more divisive statement. Meanwhile, cultures which start out with diets more whole foods, plant based and introduce the standard American diet see stark climbs in cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and the other ailments.
'Animal protein is highly inflammatory'. If this massive unqualified, non-referenced generalization is true then we can see that it doesn't translate into diffential mortality.
"United Kingdom-based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation."
Many fresh vegetables are inflammatory. Plants evolved chemicals to hinder herbation. Roots/tubers and fruit are generally fine, but leaves/stems/flowers are generally full of inflammatory anti-nutrients and should be cooked.
Blog posts and HN posts have an equal lack of authority. Authority does not matter though, facts do. You can look up the levels of oxalates, phytates, PUFAs, etc from whatever source you like and confirm reality. You don't need an "authority" to tell you what to think.
>Blog posts and HN posts have an equal lack of authority.
I agree that ultimately facts are what matter, but I disagree on this point. In the real world where it's not possible to author or reference a peer-reviewed research study for every statement or decision you'd like to make, this authority has value.
TThe administrators of Harvard Medical School, a well respected university, were willing to publish this content on a domain they controlled. This implies that some trusted expert at this trusted institution authored, reviewed, and published this content. This means that they don't believe that this content is so inaccurate as to expose the institution to a reputation loss, as opposed to say www.fake-health-expert.example.com. In fact, this may have more authority than a peer-reviewed study that doesn't properly disclose its funding by e.g. the dairy or sugar industry.
This skin in the game of reputational risk is orders of magnitude different than your or my reputational risk by posting a comment to HN.
>This implies that some trusted expert at this trusted institution authored, reviewed, and published this content.
No it does not. It is a blog post. Tons of people have blogs on that domain. There is absolutely no standard of authority or correctness involved. You are falsely inferring that there are trusted experts involved. There is no factual basis for that belief.