Douglas_Knight comments on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Alicorn 03 May 2009 03:27PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 04 May 2009 04:55:05AM 0 points [-]

There are very serious problems with causation in diet. There are robust correlations between, for example, eating meat, cholesterol, and heart disease, but they are definitely not causal. It is difficult to change cholesterol levels by changing diet and even harder to affect heart disease. It's not even clear that cholesterol levels cause heart disease. It's pretty clear that statins reduce cholesterol and reduce heart disease, but it's not clear that these are related.