@pizzaiolo I first read this as 12 individuals. Thought that seemed excessive then remembered some eating contests I’ve seen in Texas…
This just sounds like another version of the 80:20 rule or the Pareto principle.
“The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”
This is the same study posted somewhere else. The survey is flawed in that they asked what people ate in the last 24 hours.
That simply means that those people ate a lot in the last 24 hours. Should have been over a week or a month to get a better distribution.
“We analyzed 24-h dietary recall data from adults (n = 10,248) in the 2015–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).”
Exactly. In a world where people at a big steak dinner once a week, you’d see a similar result.
I responded to your comment before, but didn’t sufficiently think it through, so I deleted my previous response.
You raise a good point, and they do indeed acknowledge this flaw in the study:
One limitation of this work is that it was based on 1-day diet recalls, so our results do not represent usual intake. Averaging both days of data available on the NHANES would not address this problem, would reduce our sample size by 15%, and would mix recall methods between an in-person interview (day 1) and one done on the phone (day 2). Still, as a check, we examined day 2 and found the same associations with gender and MyPlate guidance.
If that was all that was flawed… who actually takes time to do nutritional surveys? People who care about nutrition. And the current fad is that you should eat less meat. So a disproportionate number of them are going to under represent how much meat they eat. So it should say, only 12% of people who answered this survey were honest.
I don’t totally agree. I’d be interested in grouping the data by “response day of the week”, but given that the sample size is 10k (which is huge in nutrition science) and that they didn’t all respond at the same time, there’s definitely enough response time variability to reduce short term seasonality.
Honestly if you asked over the previous week or month you’d probably just get less accurate responses and it’d skew the data even more.
This shit is so fucking stupid
What do you mean? I eat a lot of steak and am unlikely to change that too much, but these are just numbers, and they seem to check out.
It’s not that the study methods are bogus, but that they don’t actually tell us what the headline says, which, incidentally, is not the title of the study. The actual title of the study is: “Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age of Global Warming”
And from the abstract:
The objective of this study was to identify the demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral correlates of disproportionate beef consumption in the United States.
So the study actually does do a good job of that, because 24-hr recall is sufficient to tell us the relative rates of high beef consumption in different population segments.
What it’s not good at differentiating is determining whether it is fewer individuals consuming beef more frequently or a greater number of individuals consuming beef less frequently.
That is to say, 10% of the population consuming >4oz of beef every day compared to 20% of the population consuming >4oz of beef every 2nd day would appear the same. It still does tell us how much beef is being consumed by the population, however, so the data isn’t useless.
Does guys eat beef for breakfast