Thread by @realDaveFeldman

1/ The scientist in me is looking forward to this new, real world data emerging on #HealthConscious #Carnivores.

It will help provide data that helps confirm/disconfirm the long standing assumption that "healthy user bias" has been effectively adjusted for by researchers...

2/ If you're not familiar with "healthy user bias" (HUB), it's a known potential confounder where those who are doing what they feel is healthy in one regard (such as avoidance of red meat), can often have other likewise "healthy habits", such as more exercise, less smoking, etc

3/ This is a big problem with epidemiology given the overlap is quite common.

To mitigate this, there are efforts to adjust for these confounders such as through statistical techniques (ie sensitivity analyses)

4/ But all adjustments are necessarily built on assumptions. And as we've seen many times in the past, these studies via epidemiological data & modeling can tell a very different story from the clinical outcome data (for ex: the giant RCT via Nurses Health Study on HRT and CVD)

5/ This isn't to say statistical abstraction with epidemiological data isn't valuable, only that nothing is as valuable as the real world outcomes themselves.

Hence, the value of an emerging, health conscious, meat-eating population to test the accuracy of these HUB adjustments.

6/ Will we find meat (and in particular, red meat) is as pathogenic as is currently concluded -- even in these studies where they are adjusting for healthy user bias?

We may be in for some answers very soon...