The health effects of red meat consumption are weak, with small hazard ratios, making causality difficult to establish, especially when considering confounding factors.

“net net I would say that every one of these studies basically ends up having the same issue with it which is when you look at the details you realize it is very difficult to um to come up with a meaningful uh view that it's red meat specifically that is driving cancer as opposed to the absence of vegetables the absence of fiber or maybe the presence of some of the ultr processing things that go into consum assuming certain patterns of meat like you know uh uh you know gas station bot jerky and stuff like that so um you know we could talk a lot more about this but I I really think that the health effects the ill health effects for red meat consumption is incredibly weak um the hazard ratios themselves for this are very very small even with all of the limitations that I've mentioned um and so therefore if you go back to kind of the Austin Bradford Hill criteria of epidemiology which um you know I outlin in great detail in the book um very hard to imagine that there is causality here in fact the epidemiology here is so underwhelming that it almost draws the opposite conclusion that there it's almost hard to believe there is a signal”