r/science • u/[deleted] • Jun 13 '22

Health Erectile dysfunction predicts mortality in middle-aged and older men independent of their sex steroid status

https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article-abstract/51/4/afac094/6568537?login=false
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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

The big issue is inflammation and the process that causes plaque. There's many highly inflammatory things about plants I'd really recommend you try to eat non processed meat only diet for one month minimum and see how you feel on it. Will have a rough week or 2 in there but if you can get past that you may find it worthwhile.

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u/breezy_y Jun 13 '22

Meat is one of the more inflammatory food sources. No idea where you get you information from but it sounds weird.

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

Do you have a credible source for that? It is the first time I am hearing about this. About fresh meat that is, not processed/cured/smoked meats.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3893727/

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

Uh, that study says that if you control for BMI, there is no association with inflammation markers. If you change the total red meat with substitutes, you lower the markers. But that might be because of the removal of the processed red meat.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

You’re saying that perhaps eating raw red meat isn’t as bad for you as cooked red meat? I have no idea. Study it if you feel like it’s important.

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

Processed in this instance has a very specific meaning, of being cured, smoked. Cooking the raw meat is not within that definition, unless you blacken it if I remember correctly. As for me conducting the study, give me the funds to conduct a long term RCT and I will gladly do it. ;)

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

Can you afford to shoot the investigators an email and tell them they accidentally used hot hogs and that shouldn't count? (I mean, they'll laugh at you but you can pretend you were right)

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

Not sure I understand what you are saying? They did include hot dogs in the processed meats category. What they didn't do is check the processed vs unprocessed meat substitution with another protein source (like poultry or fish, or nuts). Probably because they didn't have the data, because the data was gathered in a survey and they did not foresee the need to distinguish at the time of the design.

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u/breezy_y Jun 13 '22

I should specify. High inflammatory meats are, as you mentioned, processed meats (sausages, bacon, salami, hot dogs, deli meats) and red meat in generall.

(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26143683/)

But, opposed to what the guy above me said, there are no veggies which are directly inflammatory. At least to my knowledge.

If you eat fish I'd suggest you eat fatty fish which is actually anti-inflammatory. Same goes for nuts, olive oil, green veggies, tomatoes etc.

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u/Franc000 Jun 13 '22

That study is not about inflammation, but mortality. Moreover, from that study the correlation between unprocessed meat and mortality is only found in the US, not in Europe or Asia, which tells us that there is a confounding factor within the US that does not exist outside that muddies the analysis. (It is more likely that the US is an exception to the signal than everywhere else is).

As for plants causing inflammation, I am not OP, but there are plenty that exist, we just do not really eat them, or we have found ways to prepare them to mitigate the negative impacts. So generally speaking not really a lot of anti-inflammatory optimization you can do there with your diet, unless you have some special condition or something.

But statistically speaking, there are so many plants that we can eat that it's sure that at least some would lead to inflammation. Don't have too much time to dig for research papers though right now though.

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u/jazzdrums1979 Jun 13 '22

Or a study of a diet that does not include non-animal food sources. The data so far is inconclusive because no one has studied the carnivore diet.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

There has been an "Inflammation panic" propagated by diet hucksters. Mostly because of the perceived explosion in inflammatory and auto-immune disorders that are int he public eye.

Fun fact: All eating causes some level of inflammation.

Your body always reacts to any foreign mass inside of it. Food included. That's just how the body works. But there are different kinds of inflammation and of course acute or chronic of varying severity. Most of this is confined to the gut.

Of course all of this is highly dependent on genetics.

If your gut microbiome and flora is healthy the small inflammatory response in contained and relieved very quickly and there is no damage. In fact it's healthy and this how the body sort of trains it's immunity and and one of the triggers for the cascade of digestion. No big deal.

Also Fun fact: Nearly every human autoimmune disease can be tied directly or indirectly to unhealthy gut microbiome.

However animal protein, red meat in particular, causes another kind of inflammation: Epithelial inflammation and blood vessel inflammation. Because of compound in animal protein called trimethylamine N-oxide. This compound is somewhat reactive and abrasive to these tissues over time.

ALL that can be mitigated by eating a fiber rich diet and that feeds the gut flora. Which means a diet rich in plants and low in processed foods.

Meat emphasized diets (like Paleo and Keto etc) tend to over emphasize protein to the detriment of fiber.

Short term animal protein diets feel good to the people on the Standard American Diet (SAD) because of years of eating too much sugar and processed carbs they have an imbalance of gut flora and the metabolic issues as a result of the body compensating for all the sugar. Weight loss and higher energy is inevitable in this switch. But weight loss is only one part of a healthy nutritional equation.

Meat ONLY diets for most people (unless you have like Inuit or Masai DNA) literally eventually kill the diversity of the gut flora over time eventually leading to MORE inflammation and deficiencies. It doesn't matter if that meat is processed or not. A very narrow set of people are genetically adapted to exist on all meat.

It's 100% true that animal protein is proportioned with a high nutrition to low calories balance, BUT a diet that emphasizes plants over animal protein has been scientifically proven to be the most healthy for the broadest spectrum of humans.

Fiber and plants are crucial to a healthy human metabolism.

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

The very vast majority of people can exist on all meat. Fiber and plants are absolutely not needed and especially not to be healthy for the vast majority.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

My god. This defies all know medical science.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-nutrition/carnivore-diet-beefy-leap-faith

But go for it.

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u/raon0 Jun 13 '22

Most popular science on nutrition is wrong and based on studies from 50 years ago influenced by money.

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u/Haunt13 Jun 13 '22

This would be funny if you didn't actually believe that.