Not a sausage

Q: Did you see the Sausages of DOOM are back?

A: In the Herald? Yes.

Q: They say “Swapping a sausage for whole grain toast, a few tomatoes or a handful of nuts could lead to a much longer life, research has shown.” How much longer?

A: The research goes to great lengths not to answer that question, but we could ignore all those the details and assume the number applies to that question and is reliable.

Q: Well,  the story does, so let’s do that.

A: Ok. A bit less than a hour.

Q: That’s not very long.

A: One sausage isn’t very much.

Q: But they mean one sausage less every day, surely.

A: In that case, a bit less than an hour per day.

Q: Where does that number come from?

A: If you look at the biggest risk you can find anywhere in the research report, it’s a hazard ratio of 1.34 for an additional 3% of your energy intake from meat protein. On average 3% in the US or here is about 75 Calories, so about 19g of protein.  That’s about two sausages (Freedom Farms has nutritional info easily available, others are probably similar).  So we’re looking at a hazard ratio of 1.16 per daily sausage.  One ‘microlife‘ per day is about a hazard ratio of 1.09.

Q: What’s that in cigarettes?

A: Two or three.

Q: Where did you find the research report? There’s a link in the story, but it just goes to the publisher’s home page.

A: It’s here. Open access, too.

Q: If I ask you about those details you mentioned ignoring, will I regret it?

A: Yes.

Q: I’m going to ask anyway.

A: Ok.  The research was trying to estimate the difference in risk from a replacement of animal protein with plant protein, making no change in fat, calories, carbohydrates, or anything else.

Q: So we’d have to replace the sausage with low-carbohydrate toast with a lot of margarine?

A: Butter. Saturated fat has to stay the same, too.

Q: But they found a huge difference between processed and unprocessed red meat! That’s the same protein, just chopped up, maybe with different amounts of fat and some preservatives. How could it be the protein that’s doing it?

A: Well, obviously it can’t. They must be picking up other things about diet as well.

Q: What do they say about that?

A: They say the other factors might affect how much effect animal protein has on you, but they couldn’t explain the overall effect

Q: But..

A: They also said that the risk difference between people with healthy and unhealthy lifestyles could maybe be explained by fish and chicken protein being less harmful than red meat protein

Q:  Really?

A: Those with unhealthy lifestyles consumed more processed and unprocessed red meat, whereas the healthy-lifestyle group consumed more fish and chicken as animal protein sources, suggesting that different protein sources, at least in part, contributed to the observed variation in the protein-mortality associations according to lifestyle factors

Q: Does that make more sense than it sounds as if it does?

A: I don’t think so.

Q: So sausages are actually healthy?

A: No, but they aren’t dramatically different from last week. And it’s probably not the composition of the protein that’s the biggest problem with them