Two weeks ago, Vik wrote a column for the The Health Care Blog on the now infamous meat-and-cheese study done by a team of researchers led by folks from USC. You can read the column, and the hilarious comments, here. I sent the column to one of the researchers, using the messaging available at LinkedIn. Here is that researcher’s response in its entirety:
I feel no need to get into a debate with someone who doesn’t understand basic statistics, how research is conducted, and has written a statement that is blatantly wrong. It does worry me that you are propagating yourself as an “expert” when you can’t seem to critically evaluate or understand a study. I know that this study is not perfect, hardly any are, especially in epidemiology, but the points you bring up in your blog are completely misconstrued and show very poor understanding of research methodology.
If you had actually read and understood the paper you would see that we controlled for waist circumstance [sic] and BMI. Also, this isn’t some random population of fat, low educated, American smokers, it is a nationally representative sample–unfortunately this is what the American population looks like. Finally, the idea that you think our supplemental tables house the real results illustrates your lack of understanding about statistics or how mortality models are run.
That being said, if you come up with a legitimate critique, I would be happy to engage in a friendly debate. When you attack something, I would suggest you make sure you understand it first, otherwise it is hard to legitimize anything else you say. I find it ironic that most of the push back from this paper has been from the general public who don’t have experience doing these types of studies, while for the most part, the scientific community (at least from people at R1 universities) has been fairly receptive.
We are glad to offer this legitimate critique, beginning with what we find in the very first sentence of the Results discussion that is not in the paper itself, but in the supplementary materials: “Using Cox Proportional Hazard Models, we found no association between protein consumption and either all-cause, CVD, or cancer mortality (Table S2).” Table S1 makes the point even more clearly: all-cause mortality in the low protein group was 42.9%. All-cause mortality in the high protein group was 42.9%, meaning that there is ZERO impact on overall mortality from protein variation at the extremes.
