Epidemiologic nutritional studies are proven to be totally useless. They literally are a questionnaire asking people what do they eat, take some health markers and drawing conclusions. I spent the morning reading through the data of that "plant-based diets reduce colorectal cancer" on the front-page of the Guardian [1], and it's yet another pile of cherry picked inconclusive crap people will keep sharing on social media.

From just 2 minutes with your paper: "Higher heme iron intake appeared to be significantly associated with a 31 % (95 % CI 4–67 %) elevated risk of developing CHD" --- lmao, loving that 95% confidence interval between 4 and 67%.

Passing those out as proof of real science keeps the disinformation and terrible practice alive. If I had a dime every time a random commenter gave me a link to an epidemiologic nutritional study, I could fund a double blind randomized one myself.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/29/plant-based-... — have fun reading the actual numbers in Tables 2, 3 and 4 of the linked paper.

I'm curious how one gets a 95% confidence on such a wide margin. I'm having trouble visualizing data that would give such a result. Is this just a result of a very wide distribution of data? Or is this done with shady statistics. The 95% seems to imply that there's data on either side of their chosen bounds. To my understanding, the real "beef" with the article is the choice of representing the data as "31%" when there's such a wide distribution. A more accurate statement would be that, "nearly everyone experienced some heightened risk of CHD with the actual risk varying largely, but firmly positive". Thoughts?

people who had less than 4% elevated risk composed 2.5% of the group, and people who had over 67% elevated risk composed 2.5% of the group

if normally distributed, two thirds would have elevated risk between 14% and 48%

that is to say, almost everyone has an elevated risk - so I have no idea why you are complaining about confidence intervals

Consuming a lot of TMAO is proven to be bad for the heart. Cod contains TMAO in great amounts.

Yet white fish is one of the most recommended heart healthy foods.

You have to be careful when talking about specific mechanisms in terms of Whole Foods. Nutrition can't be reduced down to single mechanisms to provide confident recommendations, and often times results are the opposite of what we would expect mechanistically.

it also has EPA and DHEA, so it's possible those offset the effects of too much iron

also, it's still lower than red meat, it's on the order of white meat

if you want an iron-rich fish you'd have to go up to bluefin tuna, which does have a red tint to its meat