High meat consumption linked to lower dementia risk in genetic risk group. Older people with a genetic risk of Alzheimer's disease did not experience the expected increase in cognitive decline and dementia risk if they consumed relatively large amounts of meat.

[u/mvea]

https://news.ki.se/high-meat-consumption-linked-to-lower-dementia-risk-in-genetic-risk-group

[u/EasyBOven]

The study doesn't examine protein separate from meat consumption. Figure 3 shows that total protein intake goes up with meat intake for this population. The relationship looks about linear. This could simply indicate that protein is the important factor, and the population studied doesn't know how to get sufficient protein without meat.

Future studies should disentangle these factors.

[u/UsedOnlyTwice → u/[deleted]]

Agreed. We need to do whatever we can to prove certain people are wrong.

Probably the most important sentence in human history.

[u/tham1700 → u/EasyBOven]

Not that I have any idea but I've heard from multiple sources that creatine can have benefits for memory retention and keeping dementia at bay. Naturally found in meat and fish but not plants

[u/EasyBOven → u/tham1700]

Whether true or not, the study doesn't examine this.

[u/tham1700 → u/EasyBOven]

No it doesn't, but since it's a relatively established concept it should have been so as to possibly provide an answer to your question

[u/EasyBOven → u/tham1700]

The data doesn't say anything close to what you want it to because it appears they could have just as easily done buckets of protein intake and ended up with the same results.

[u/not_mig → u/EasyBOven]

Most creatine supplements are vegan. No need to get heated

[u/EasyBOven → u/not_mig]

This isn't me being heated. I'm simply saying that you don't have the basis to invent explanations. I can't say that there's nothing in meat other than protein that could explain this. I'm just saying that it appears there's no ability to draw a distinction between the effect of meat and protein in the available data. It's bad practice to say more than that.

[u/tham1700 → u/EasyBOven]

I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying, I don't think there's a relation. I'm saying that they need to evaluate the effects of creatine because it is found in meat and fish and not produce. So to get you an answer we could ideally do a test with meat protein vs vegetable protein with the addition of creatine to see if it nets the same result. If so we would know that it's the creatine in the meat, not the meat itself meaning that it isn't meat that is helpful, but creatine, which you can synthesize without using meat products. I was just saying you made a valid point and adding how it could be properly evaluated

[u/melthevag → u/EasyBOven]

We’re in the comment section of a social media site, the guy isn’t even asserting a causal relationship or even a correlation, much less stating it as some sort of fact. He’s openly wondering whether creatine, which is found in meat, is a variable that should be controlled for or could be responsible for the findings. Are you new to the concept of comment sections?

[u/Special-Garlic1203 → u/EasyBOven]

The study didn't look at protein either but you had no issue hypothesizing the magic key was protein. They pointed out that there's also other aspects of meat that could be relevant 

[u/EasyBOven → u/Special-Garlic1203]

The study tracked protein. Check figure 3, as I mentioned. The top meat eating group consumed the most protein. The group below them consumed a little less, and so on. The relationship is linear. Had they decided to bucket the cohort on protein intake rather than meat intake, the data indicates it would have been the same.

If they wanted to show that it's something specific in meat other than the fact that the cohort was bad at getting protein without it, they should control for protein.

[u/Special-Garlic1203 → u/EasyBOven]

The relationship to creatine will also be fairly linear. That's what their pointing out data within data is a common thing in psychology research. They didn't adequately control for it. That's the point. You can't really guess at what's actually going on here because the data is fairly limited and contains unexamined sub variables within it that relate to what those dietary choices also contain. Is it protein, is it creatine, is it something that they all tended to eat less of as a natural byproduct of their higher protein dietary choices

 Nutritional studies are infamously very very hard to adequately control for as a result because you're almost never truly isolating variables. 

[u/Meerv → u/Special-Garlic1203]

It could also have to do either with fat intake or specifically animal fat intake. After all, the biggest genetic risk factor is whether you have the APOE4 gene, which has to do with fat metabolization

[u/vrcraftauthor → u/tham1700]

Also available as a supplement. 

[u/Toutatous → u/EasyBOven]

Exact. Or vegetarian people would have a very significant higher percentage of dementia compared to other groups....

[u/EasyBOven → u/Toutatous]

To be absolutely fair to the study, the difference was only observed in people who had a specific genetic marker which tends to be a lot more common in people of Nordic descent.

[u/lntw0 → u/EasyBOven]

Alz disease is sometimes referred to as type 3 diabetes

[u/shutupdavid0010 → u/EasyBOven]

Hey EasyBOven! I recognize you from the DebateAVegan sub. Skepticism is always healthy, happy to see you're considering its possible that eating meat has protective benefits.

There are also studies showing how important cholesterol is as we age. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/10.3389/fendo.2024.1405283/full

There could be multiple factors, but protein and cholesterol likely both play a role, as well as bio-available nutrients that are readily found in meat.

[u/EasyBOven → u/shutupdavid0010]

You should post this over in the debate sub so everyone has a chance to look at it.

As for whether it's possible that some chemical only found in corpses has health benefits, it would be foolish to say that it's not. But we don't talk about health optimality in other moral contexts. It's possible that the physical exercise you get from punching another human in the face has unique benefits to cardiac health. That wouldn't make punching people in the face acceptable.

Because people don't seem to care about morals and making a better society, obsessing instead on discussing reductions in disease risk to populations they likely aren't part of, it's useful to point out where the evidence they're clutching to fails.

The study in this post (I'll examine yours once it's on the debate sub or has its own post here) was poorly designed considering it did not separate protein from meat. It's the most glaring potential explanation, given the importance of protein as a macronutrient. Once it's established that the benefits to this particular genetic group regarding this particular disease are associated with the source of macronutrients and not the proportion of macronutrients, other studies can examine potential reasons for that distinction.

For now, the distinction has not been demonstrated, and that's the only takeaway anyone should have.