 So I said, well, why then are you, you know, supporting a carnivore diet? And he said, well, we've got anecdotes. We've got anecdotes. We're collecting anecdotes. Explain what an anecdote is for someone who's listening who might not. An anecdote is the equivalent of a story. So normally if you look at the dictionary definition of anecdote, it's an amusing story. So the difference between an anecdote and science is it's the difference between collecting data under control conditions from thousands of people and potentially carrying that study on in a longitudinal fashion for many years. So you can get like, you can track people's health outcomes and asking someone on the train how they're feeling. That's the difference between an anecdote and saying, you know, oh, yeah, I feel like this today and a scientific study that has got thousands of people, thousands and thousands of data points and statistics to, and it's been peer reviewed and published in prestigious journals are supporting the plant based lifestyle. So that's the best available evidence we have on nutrition is these big population studies. So they're like a cohort study where they either go backwards in time and track people or they follow them because a lot of people might not understand research and how it's collected and how statistics are collected and how, you know, they find these differences in health outcomes. Can you explain like what a cohort is and how like, let's just say the Adventist study, how they would do something like that? Okay, so what they might do is take a cohort, so a group of people, a large group of people, and they might want to, let's say, for example, look at colon cancer as one of their potential outcomes. So at baseline, they'll take a lot of data. So they'll, they'll get medical evidence from records. So they'll make sure that nobody at baseline has got colon cancer. They'll take measures to do with the current diet and things like that. So that's one of the criticisms of these cohort studies that some of them have only looked at what diet people are on once. And then once they start following them for years, well, people might change their diet. So that's an obvious criticism. But there are some studies that have actually consistently, consistently tested diet and got people to do not just one, a one questionnaire, but food diaries and things like that. So no, it's not perfect, but it's the best we can do whilst being ethical. What do you mean by that, being ethical? Because you can't lock people in the room and do work. Exactly. Yeah, do like an RCT. Exactly. You can't take people out of their everyday life, say, right, you guys don't have colon cancer. You guys don't have colon cancer either. So we're now going to lock you up for 10 years. Give one of you colon cancer, but through diet. And we're going to force feed half of you a carnivore diet and force feed half of you a plant based diet. You can't do that. It's unethical. So the next best thing is to track people through their daily lives, take measures of what they're eating and other that they also take into account things like alcohol use, smoking, exercising, exercise. Yeah. Other other health possibilities social sort of setting or didn't the event to study account for the most variables? It was a very comprehensive study. Yeah. So the more comprehensive a study is, the more well planned it is, the more variables that you can account for throughout the entire study, then the less limitations that study has. So there's no one perfect study, every single study that's ever been published in any field whatsoever, not just nutrition or psychology or biology, but physics and all of it. There's always going to be limitations. And that's why when authors write up papers, they always have a section in their discussion addressing the limitations and then suggesting future ideas for research, how such limitations might be overcome in the future. Okay. So in terms of cohort studies, what if you just one one cohort study that had ever been done and that was it on one population, one sample, say the Adventist study, and they'd collected it, you know, over a few years and it was just one, I wouldn't be convinced by it. The thing that convinces me is, although these studies have their limitations, what they are doing is collecting data from many different parts of the world, different types of people, asking different types of questions using statistical methods that are the most robust that they possibly can be. So taking into account lots of possible confounding variables. And the data comes together as a consistent body of research. The other thing about scientific research is that if you find what we call converging lines of evidence. So we've got the cohort studies like the epidemiological data sets. But we've also got more mechanistic data. We've also got however cruel they might be, we've also got animal studies. So we can we can look at models of how things might be playing out in the body. Yeah, mechanistic data, just explain mechanistic to people. Mechanistic data is how something works. Yeah. So because you can't look inside the body, you can't look inside the body. What you've kind of got to do is, again, it's about compromise because you can't rip people open to look at their insight. It's unethical to do that. So there's other ways you can do it. You can do in vitro studies which are in the test tube. You can develop animal models and look at animals. But mechanistic data is just how something works and tracking, like putting together a model. Sometimes it's theoretical because sometimes you don't have all the evidence. But like, for example, the role of cholesterol in atherosclerosis, that's a big thing that the carnice are denying at the moment. And they say that, you know, we should only look at the mechanistic data. But we know how atherosclerosis develops. And we know that LDL has got a role in that development. It's not the sole cause, but we know from converging lines of evidence through many years of different studies. So how can that be denied? So they can overall, in terms of nutrition, what we've got at the moment. And we can pick studies apart. We can look at the different flaws in individual studies. But because we've got replicative findings, we've got different populations, different locations, different time points, looking at a variety of different like illness outcomes, like cancer, heart disease, strokes, et cetera, et cetera. And then we've got the mechanistic side, we have got some randomized control trials, they tend to be small scale, they tend to be again flawed, but putting the body of evidence together, all of it together, what we can say is eating meat is one of the worst things you can do for your health. So you're saying all of these collectively are pointing to the same thing? So they're all supporting bits of data. And then they do something, it's a meta analysis where they analyze a group of a large group of like a few hundred studies and see if there's anything consistent. So what they do in meta analysis is they start off with what we call a systematic review of the literature. So they might want to look at all the different studies that have been done on colon cancer and meat, for example, right? So they systematically review the literature, they make sure they don't miss anything. And then if they have enough studies that have used broadly the same measures, then they can do a meta analysis. So as well as the systematic review, which is a systematic review of the literature, they do a meta analysis, which is a statistical technique which looks at the magnitude of the effect overall. So it pulls the data from all of those different studies, and it looks at the effect sizes and how strong the effects are. So meta analyses are considered the pinnacle of the hierarchy of evidence, the scientific hierarchy of evidence. Again, the hierarchy is something that the carnists deny. And I've done a video on the hierarchy of evidence, and I'll readily admit that just because it's a meta analysis doesn't mean it's good. Because there are some terrible meta analyses out there. It might be that the research area doesn't lend itself terribly well to meta analyses because the measures aren't really very consistent. Would you say that the worst meta analysis is better than the best anecdote in terms of evidence? Oh, without a shadow of a doubt. The anecdotes don't even make it on to the hierarchy of evidence because they're not science. They're just not science. They're just having a conversation. You could say anything, and that would be considered evidence. Exactly.