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

www.mdpi.com Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age of Global Warming

Concern for the environment when making dietary choices has grown as the contribution of the food sector to global greenhouse gas emissions becomes more widely known. Understanding the correlates of beef eating could assist in the targeting of campaigns to reduce the consumption of high-impact foods...

30 comments

This is the same study posted somewhere else. The survey is flawed in that they asked what people ate in the last 24 hours.
That simply means that those people ate a lot in the last 24 hours. Should have been over a week or a month to get a better distribution.
“We analyzed 24-h dietary recall data from adults (n = 10,248) in the 2015–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).”
- Exactly. In a world where people at a big steak dinner once a week, you’d see a similar result.
  
  Why would everyone be eating the big steak dinner the day before they were asked this survey question though?
- 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.
  
  Yeah, I feel this is an early report to decide if a larger study is warranted
- 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!
- 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.
  
  AKA healthy user bias

@pizzaiolo I first read this as 12 individuals. Thought that seemed excessive then remembered some eating contests I've seen in Texas...
- Glad I’m not the only one that read it that way. Shame on me for reading the internet before the coffee kicks in.

Burgers Georg, who lives in a cave and eats over 10000 burgers a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

FWIW, I'm not a huge fan of MDPI; they've got something of a reputation for being shoddier on peer review than some other journals. I'd look for replication elsewhere before fully trusting this.

This just sounds like another version of the 80:20 rule or the Pareto principle.
"The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes"
- It is. This sounds like a hit piece. You could use this argument to make anything sound bad.

Most surprising here, imo, is that only 12% of the population eats more than 4oz. of beef per day. That honestly feels low to me.
- You might be one of the 12%.
  
  Running the math on my own habits, I don't think so, but I just figured some people are enough burgers alone to push the numbers higher than that
- Dude that's so SO much beef WTF you mean that you're surprised?
  
  I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that 10% of the population ate a 4oz burger for lunch every single day. Not saying it's good or not a lot, but just thought more people did it
- @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.