A presenter examines a Nature Medicine study on processed meat that media outlets cited for alarming health claims. The study itself rated most links as weak or very weak using a star system, with ischemic heart disease getting just one star. Headlines stripped away these crucial caveats about effect sizes and inconsistent findings.
Just how unhealthy is processed meat? Quoting from CNN, "Consumption of even a small amount of processed meat is linked to increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and colorectal cancer." Now, here's the thing. Technically, that quote's not wrong. But most articles, including this one, leave out critical nuances, the kind that actually matter to your health decisions every single day. So let's break down and digest the data. Now, this CNN report is based on a new paper about processed meat and health that was published in the journal Nature Medicine. Navigate to the paper and Ctrl+F search the words weak and inconsistent in the paper. They show up about 18 times in just the main text and the captions. Now, again, quoting from the paper, these associations each received 2-star ratings reflecting weak relationships or inconsistent input evidence. Or, these associations are rated as relatively weak 2-star relationships, reflecting small effect sizes and/or lack of consistent evidence. We found even weaker 1-star associations between processed meat and ischemic heart disease. Simply put, again quoting, the existing evidence is weak.
