I think there is some evidence that undercooking red meat might make it a better health option.
Thank you for putting this in the War Zone, where it belongs.
What would you like to discuss? TMAO? Neu5gc? Acid/Alkaline balance and bone mass? AGES in cooked meat (maybe we should eat our red meat, rare.
). Cow farts causing global-warming? Antibiotic-resistant bacteria?
Can I suggest a ground rule?
No within-population epidemiology, where what people ate is determined by dietary recall, and where the difference between dietary groups is marginal at best. Any study that says that each serving of any substance-sugar, fat, meat, javex--increases risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, by ten, fifteen, thirty percent. If only people who drink from a certain well get cholera, or 27 times as many smokers get lung cancer as non-smokers--now that's epidemiology worth looking at.
As is between-population epidemiology. Low heart disease in a whole population with a fairly homogenous diet, compared to people in the culture who have gone through a dietary transition often makes enough of a difference that you can say yes, the difference between what these guys eat and what those guys eat is probably making a difference in disease rates. The classic example of this is the difference in dental health observed by Weston Price in people eating country vs. "town" diets. Or what has happened in slightly more recent history when you look at first and third generation Japanese Hawaiians.
I think it is reasonable to assume that diet is important in a situation like that. And you can say--the first generation, with a diet high in starchy carbohydrate, low in fat, low in sugar, moderate in animal products, had less of the so-called "diseases of civilization" than the third generation. Yes, people and Big Mac's and chocolate milk-shakes and french fries to their diets, and become less health. When you put it that way, almost nobody will disagree with you.
John McDougall would say, the problem is the meat, and the fat. After all, the Rice Diet was shown to be therapeutic for some very sick people. So, the starch and the sugar that were added to people's diets were harmless. But no, they were only harmless in the context of the Rice Diet. Give somebody the Atkins Diet, or further, a zero-carb diet, or a strict ketogenic diet, all of these have had therapeutic effects every bit as striking as those claimed for the rice diet or McDougall's starch-based plan. So a low-carber might say, see? Red meat and fat are harmless. Again, no--all that's shown is that the overall dietary scheme was healthful, not that any of the individual elements of the diet are intrinsically healthful in and of themselves.
For me, the question isn't "is fructose safe?" It's "Under what conditions is fructose safe?" Conditions being, who is it safe for, what genetic or epigenetic factors are there? What can it safely be eaten with? If it's safe as long as calories are below a certain level, then--how can I eat it without the fructose encouraging me to overeat?
Same with saturated fat. There are diets where, say, adding 100 grams of butter a day would unquestionably make them worse. Start with an extremely high carbohydrate diet that consists mostly of potato. Protein is marginal on this diet, weaned children might sometimes develop kwaskiokr. This is an extreme--but odds are, there's a diet where you've probably crapped things up quite a bit, if you've added that much butter. Protein as a percent would go from marginal to sub-marginal. Send some butter to some 17th century Inuit, have them eat a little less caribou or seal fat in place of the butter, and in that context, this rise in saturated fat from butter is far less likely to have a harmful effect. Context matters.