Originally Posted by teaser

Sort of a different way to approach this--I don't think meat, saturated fat and such are necessarily causative, although I do think it likely that they're conditionally causative. An obvious example--if somebody indulges their love of meat with a trip to McDonald's, gets a Big Mac, fries, apple pie and a shake. I'm more likely to overeat fried rice with fat and beef in it than boiled white rice. You can have a healthy diet with lots of beef in it, that doesn't presuppose that there aren't baseline diets that can be made worse by the addition of meat--but even there, something has to go, but it doesn't have to be the beef.