Column #335      February 4, 2022

John P.A. Ioannidis is a professor, epidemiologist, and scientist at Stanford University. For more about his credentials visit his biography page.¹

Soon after COVID-19 was in the news, Ioannidis was in the minority declaring that, in study after study, the virus would not be that big a threat and that economic shutdowns were not the answer. For that he was called dead wrong by critics who saw fundamental errors in his early findings and the CDC ignored him. Looking back, it’s clear that Ioannidis was closer to the truth than all of his detractors.

For instance, analysts from John Hopkins just recently reached a conclusion about lockdowns. “While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”²

But Ioannidis’ position on the virus is not the purpose of this column. Instead I want to highlight a study he did 17 years ago about how ignorance is hiding in the millions of “scientific” reports utilizing bad science. The report’s title is; “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”³

There are many reasons for false findings. Basically they involve biases and other less devious flaws. He describes bias this way: “Bias can entail manipulation in the analysis or reporting of findings. Selective or distorted reporting is a typical form of such bias.” Then he described many other ways errors creep into a study and concluded that; “A major problem is that it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what the truth is in any research question. In this regard, the pure ‘gold’ standard is unattainable.”

There are additional, very sinister reasons for missing or misleading reports. Robert Kennedy wrote about one instance, which occurred in 1991, in his heavily footnoted book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.” On page 209 he described what happened when Harvard microbiologist Dr. Charles Thomas tried to submit a letter to “Nature” registering an objection to Robert Gallo’s crazy HIV hypothesis. Gallo was a friend of Fauci’s and the CDC was relentlessly promoting Gallo’s highly questionable HIV hypothesis. Here’s part of the explanation.⁴

“But in an early display of Dr. Fauci’s and Big Pharma’s combined power to control the medical journals, ‘Nature’ declined to publish the letter. Nor would ‘New England Journal of Medicine,’ ‘JAMA,’ or the ‘Lancet.’ These journals rely on the pharmaceutical industry for upward of 90 percent of their revenues and seldom publish studies that threaten the Pharma paradigm. As ‘Lancet’ editor Richard Horton has observed, ‘The journals have developed into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.’ Dr. Fauci exercises direct influence on the content that appears in their journals. Control of peer-reviewed publishing is a vital ingredient for constructing orthodoxies.”⁴

The entire world saw exactly the same tactical reporting during the past two years regarding the use of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine, azytromicin and ivermectin, mask usage, lockdowns, and vaccines harms. Studies have been and still are being curtailed in the United States and news of foreign reports are still being suppressed by a very obedient media. Consequently, truth tellers are cancelled and scams are perpetrated. It’s so bad our hospitals have become killing fields.

The point I want to establish is that we just can’t assume a report is a scientific fact just because it’s written up by scientists in a comprehensively-documented format and published in a notable journal. For more than 20 years now I’ve been reporting on various nutritional studies. In so doing, even though I’m not a nutritional scientist, I see numerous errors and really outlandish stuff and comment on it. Finding good reports that are properly executed is not easy.

As for erroneous studies, I find it really outrageous how easy it is for their total nonsense to end up in the popular press. But the powers that be know that if everyone is talking about a certain report, many people will assume that what’s being reported must be indisputable scientific fact. The public will then be skeptical of those who do not agree. In the end, because of the weight of “evidence,” the public tends to believe what everyone else believes. This then brings me to another example of scientific nonsense.

Recently, a team of scientists from the University of Michigan came out with an earth shaking study. They announced that if you ate one hot dog in a bun it would shorten your life by 36 minutes. If you ate the hot dog daily, in a year your life would be shortened by 9.125 days. If you eat one hot dog per day for 75 years, their detailed study says your life will be cut short by precisely 864 days— 22.5 months. To achieve that level of accuracy, the scientists used a data bank of more than 5,800 foods that ranked each one by their nutritional disease burden to humans and their impact on the environment.^{5 6 7}

I couldn’t determine from the report what the environmental impact of a hot dog is that shortens a person’s life. But the study says they correlated 5,800 food selections with environmental impacts that “. . . were found to be correlated with global warming, except those related to water use.” It all boils down into what is called a HENI index.

“HEalth Nutritional Index (HENI), a health burden-based scoring system in disability adjusted life years (DALYs) that uses epidemiological evidence from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) to rank and evaluate food items and diets.”

Got it?

Here’s a sample of a relative food evaluation I copied from their report: “The health burden attributable to a serving of beef hotdog on a bun is 36 min lost (95% CI, 22–45 min), largely due to the detrimental effect of processed meat (Fig. 3b). For vegetable pizza (1.4 min lost per serving; 95% CI, 0.061–2.8 min) and apple pie (1.3 min gained per serving; 95% CI, −0.42 to 2.9 min), the health benefits from some vegetables and fruits are offset by the detrimental health effects of sodium and TFAs, leading to an almost neutral HENI score. The beneficial health effects of seafood-sourced omega-3 fatty acids, nuts and legumes are highlighted in the cases of baked salmon, salted peanuts, and rice with beans, while sodium had relatively limited overall contributions to HENI for each individual food, but was present in most foods.”

Yes, the report claims an apple pie is healthier than a vegetable pizza or a hot dog. Then it says one should look for Omega-3 essential fatty acids (EFAs) in nuts, peanuts, legumes, and rice! So I looked up those foods in my Food Analysis Tables which utilize “official” government data. Nuts, peanuts, legumes, and rice have very high Omega-6 to Omega-3 EFA ratios which means they will cause an Omega-3 deficiency. As for apple pie, it’s loaded with sugar and all-purpose flour which are anti nutrients. The apples are so-so, but the sugar and flour are like a bun.⁸

Basically the hot dog report is a hit piece on meat. It claims that, “. . . nutritional impacts are primarily driven by the adverse health effects associated with processed meat, red meat, trans fatty acids (TFAs), and sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), whereas the climate change impacts are driven by beef, processed meat (mix of beef and pork), pork and lamb, which are known to be associated with considerable greenhouse gas emissions, cheese-based foods and some salmon dishes. The climate change load of these foods can reach up to 5.7 kgCO2eq per 244 g in the case of beef stew (factor 1.4 uncertainty), the equivalent of about 14 miles driven by an average passenger vehicle.”

Most of the environmental studies for agricultural food production that I’ve seen have very woke global warming, “citified” slants. That means BIAS. It’s not that temperatures won’t change, because everyone knows they’ve cycled up and down in long-term swings for millions of years. But there are many basics the woke crowds seem to ignore. One is the symbiotic relationship animals have with plants and the soil. Consequently, their environmental-based anti beef arguments are wrong from the get-go. I wrote a column about this a couple of years ago titled, “You’ve Been Lied to: Methane & Cows.” The woke position on cattle and methane is quackery as I proved in my column.⁹

In that column, I said, ". . . methane doesn't stick around very long in the atmosphere. Over the course of ten years or so the methane emitted from a cow will be transformed by photochemical reactions to CO₂. That CO₂ is then taken up by plants and the cycle repeats. This means that if the cattle inventory stays constant over a ten-year time frame, the quantity of methane in the atmosphere from cattle will not decrease nor increase." America’s cattle inventory is less than it was in 1960. Therefore, today’s atmospheric methane load from cattle in the USA must be lower than 60 years ago.

The idea that a hot dog is loaded with poor quality meat, saturated fats, and dangerous seasonings is total hogwash. Low quality hot dogs are available. Stores like Save a Lot sell low-priced pork and beef hot dogs with ingredients most people want to avoid. But the same stores also offer regular beef hot dogs that are far better. In addition, quality grass-fed beef hot dogs are available and they are excellent low-glycemic, nutrient dense and diverse sources of nutrition that have 1:1 EFA ratios. They are very nutritious—far and away exceeding the nutrition that’s in virtually all other food choices.

Meat trim is meat. Some of the trim will be tenderloin, rib eye, and sirloin along with chuck and other cuts. All of that is good meat. Concerns about saturated fats have been proven to be a myth. So we do not avoid saturated animal fats. Aseem Malhotra points that out in his report: “Saturated fat is not the major issue. Let’s bust the myth of its role in heart disease, saturated animal fat is not a danger.” He explains how scientists finally asked the question and got the answer which was that saturated fats increase good LDLs, not the bad LDLs that cause arteries to clog. But the medical community continues to push old myths.¹⁰

The hot dog report states that “HENI scores for frankfurters and breakfast sandwiches, burgers and red meat are almost exclusively negative, indicating that eating an additional serving of these foods is health-damaging. On the other hand, increasing the consumption of nuts and of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (driven by nut content), legumes, seafood, fruits, snack bars, ready-to-eat cereals and non-starchy vegetables is health beneficial as most of these foods have positive HENI scores.”

It’s quite obvious that the report’s “best” foods for life expectancy are nutritionally worse than the selections promoted by the USDA’s My Plate nutritional guidelines. And the bad news is that after 60 years of USDA guidance, Americans are saddled with more obesity and chronic diseases then they were prior to the 1950s. Obviously the HENI score driven selections will be worse for mankind.

In spite of the hot dog report being broadcast far and wide, its conclusions are nutritional disasters. Compare the report’s HENI selections with other offerings shown in the Food Analysis Tables. Obviously, this highly promoted study is another deceptive study by the powers that be to get Americans to be vegetarians. It has nothing to do with extending lives or improving the incidence rate of chronic diseases. It’s all a scam that’s brought to you by the Big Pharma/Medical industrial complex.

When it comes to your health, you must be your own watchdog. Don’t let Big Pharma and its minions take you for a ride.

To your health.

Ted Slanker

Ted Slanker has been reporting on the fundamentals of nutritional research in publications, television and radio appearances, and at conferences since 1999. He condenses complex studies into the basics required for health and well-being. His eBook, The Real Diet of Man, is available online.

Don't miss these links for additional reading:

1. John P.A. Ioannidis from Stanford University Profiles

2. by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke from John Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics

3. by John P. A. Ioannidis from MIT Edu

4. The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

5. Eating a Hot Dog Takes Away 36 Minutes of Healthy Life by Susan Levin, MS, RD, CSSD from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

6. Small Changes in Diet Could Help You Live Healthier, More Sustainably from University of Michigan from Science Daily

7. Small Targeted Dietary Changes Can Yield Substantial Gains for Human Health and the Environment by Katerina S. Stylianou, Victor L. Fulgoni III, and Olivier Jolliet

8.  Food Analysis: EFA, Protein to Fat, Net Carbs, Sugar, and Nutrient Load by Ted Slanker

9. You’ve Been Lied to: Methane & Cows by Ted Slanker Column #233

10. Saturated Fat Is Not the Major Issue by Aseem Malhotra