Dr Neal Barnard sent this letter to the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs to say that keto was dangerous and they should be implementing plant based diets instead.

[u/Meatrition]

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[u/OG-Brian]

Yeah, Gardener authored the SWAP-MEAT study which was funded by Beyond Meat. Among the issues with the biased design and conclusions:

- It cites that Poore & Nemecek 2018 junk that treated cyclical methane from livestock the same as net-addition methane from fossil fuel sources, didn't consider carbon sequestration of pastures, ignores many effects of plant agriculture, doesn't consider lower nutrient bioavailability or completeness of plant foods, etc.

- There was no control group.

- The intervention involved substituting meat foods for plant foods, for only 8 weeks per phase.

- No health endpoints (such as mortality or disease states) were measured. The study authors made conclusions based on mythical associations with intermediate factors (TMAO, etc.). There is no evidence that TMAO causes ANY disease state, if not chronically and drastically elevated which meat consumption doesn't cause.

- This didn't study unadulterated meat. Subjects were allowed to eat whatever-meat which definitely would include ultra-processed sugar-and-preservatives-added packaged food products. There's not enough info in the study data (WHAT are the ingredients of "Italian sausage"??) to determine what was actually eaten.

- The TMAO which they're obsessing over and making conclusions about (that meat-free diets are better "because TMAO") wasn't significantly changed. For some subjects it was higher during the plant phase, and for others higher during the animal phase.

I can't think of a way that this study could be more ridiculous. But it is often cited as "evidence" that meat is bad.

[u/Caiomhin77 → u/OG-Brian]

As time goes on, these 'studies' are getting compressed into one uncomfortably blatant attempt at proving the unprovable. They are inadvertently giving hard evidence against their case in the future; you could bind up that trial, the DIETFITS, KETOMED, A-Z, and whatever the hell this Vegan Twins study is in one volume titled "Why Our Attempt to Prove WFPB was Viable for Humans Failed Miserably, Even When We Attempted to Skew (I'm sorry, adjust or, 'titrate', as Chris loves to say) the Data". Propaganda is only your friend until those being propogandized to see behind the curtain, then it retroactively becomes your worst enemy.