Higher intake of heme iron, the type found in red meat and other animal products—as opposed to non-heme iron, found mostly in plant-based foods—was associated with a higher risk of developing type …
analysed data spanning 36 years from over 200,000 adults enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.
So they looked at some data and found that the more heme you ate the higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes. That sounds a lot like a correlation not causation. What was the rest of their diet like? Did the higher heme eaters also consume more in general? I could not find a non paywalled copy of the paper (though I did not look that hard tbh) so cannot tell how good the study was, but from what I read I would not put any stock into these results.
Like so many other dietary studies that make the headlines, they really don’t paint the whole, or even a useful part of the picture.
Honestly I cannot tell. Nutrision studies are very hard to do and you often see contradictory studies released all the time. I don’t think media should be reporting on these studies. Better to report on the meta analysis studies that take a much more holistic view on the subject.
So they looked at some data and found that the more heme you ate the higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes. That sounds a lot like a correlation not causation. What was the rest of their diet like? Did the higher heme eaters also consume more in general? I could not find a non paywalled copy of the paper (though I did not look that hard tbh) so cannot tell how good the study was, but from what I read I would not put any stock into these results.
Like so many other dietary studies that make the headlines, they really don’t paint the whole, or even a useful part of the picture.
You don’t think the Department of Nutrition at Harvard would’ve thought to try and control for this?
Not on sci-hub yet but here’s a similar one:
https://jn.nutrition.org/article/S0022-3166(22)02864-4/fulltext#secsect0020
Honestly I cannot tell. Nutrision studies are very hard to do and you often see contradictory studies released all the time. I don’t think media should be reporting on these studies. Better to report on the meta analysis studies that take a much more holistic view on the subject.