New study: 12% of individuals are responsible for 50% of US beef consumption

Exactly. In a world where people at a big steak dinner once a week, you’d see a similar result.

I responded to your comment before, but didn't sufficiently think it through, so I deleted my previous response.

You raise a good point, and they do indeed acknowledge this flaw in the study:

One limitation of this work is that it was based on 1-day diet recalls, so our results do not represent usual intake. Averaging both days of data available on the NHANES would not address this problem, would reduce our sample size by 15%, and would mix recall methods between an in-person interview (day 1) and one done on the phone (day 2). Still, as a check, we examined day 2 and found the same associations with gender and MyPlate guidance.

I don't totally agree. I'd be interested in grouping the data by "response day of the week", but given that the sample size is 10k (which is huge in nutrition science) and that they didn't all respond at the same time, there's definitely enough response time variability to reduce short term seasonality.

Honestly if you asked over the previous week or month you'd probably just get less accurate responses and it'd skew the data even more.

That's such a leading method for gathering the data. You just ate the one cheeseburger you have every couple of months right before the study? Welp, I guess you're the person responsible for all the beef purchases now!

Could you explain why you think that's problematic? What bias do you think is being introduced here?

If the sample size is sufficiently large, this shouldn't be a problem unless there is some specific bias that's not being accounted for, like for example if there was some time dependent bias where the population ate more or less beef during the sampling period.

Since the sample is quite large, the time period shouldn't matter, and recall is probably much more accurate for 24-hr vs 7-day or longer.

If that was all that was flawed... who actually takes time to do nutritional surveys? People who care about nutrition. And the current fad is that you should eat less meat. So a disproportionate number of them are going to under represent how much meat they eat. So it should say, only 12% of people who answered this survey were honest.

Glad I’m not the only one that read it that way. Shame on me for reading the internet before the coffee kicks in.

It is. This sounds like a hit piece. You could use this argument to make anything sound bad.

You might be one of the 12%.

Dude that's so SO much beef WTF you mean that you're surprised?

Brother where the fuck would I even be fitting that in for meals every day? Cuz I'm sure as shit not actually eating a 4oz steak EVERY SINGLE NIGHT for dinner.

Maybe a burger for lunch every single day would put you around that stat line, but ordering out for a burger every day is already egregious in terms of money and health.

Like, imagine saying that shit but for salmon. How is every single person NOT eating half a salmon every day?

@idkwhatimdoing @pizzaiolo European here. I doubt if I average more than 4oz of beef per fortnight. And yes, I have the occasional steak.

I think it's because people also have preferences for other types of meat. E.g. I always prefer chicken, but it's uncommon here so usually I go with the cheapest option: pork. I'm appalled at how high I've let my meat consumption slip, but this paper would still classify me as not excessive beef consumption.

Permanently Deleted

What do you mean? I eat a lot of steak and am unlikely to change that too much, but these are just numbers, and they seem to check out.