Thanks for taking the time to read the paper so we can have a discussion, i really appreciate it, genuinely.

I can't find the graph you included in the paper, where is it from? The Schoenfeld paper? https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.112.047142 looks like it. I admit I have not read "Is Everything we eat associated with cancer? A Systematic cookbook review" yet.

I think the major thrust of the argument is that correlative studies of epidemiology are a poor place to set prescriptive guidance from.

Even the Schoenfeld 2013 says "Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients. Many single studies highlight implausibly large effects, even though evidence is weak. Effect sizes shrink in meta-analyses."

The context of sick person confounders also needs to be accounted for in RCTs, such as sugar intake in diets, healthy patient confounders, etc. (A classic example would be smokers tend to eat red meat and ignore common health guidance, and also eat more red meat - we could try to control for the smokers, but they would skew any epidemiological results)

i.e.

A pooled analysis of prospective cohort studies in Asian countries even indicated that red meat intake was associated with lower cardiovascular mortality in men and cancer mortality in women (Lee et al., 2013).

This data point speaks to a confounder in the western cohort, I suspect its sugar and processed food.

It would be a interesting, and likely positive correlation, research question - Red Meat Plus High Carbohydrates all cause mortality? I suspect any combination of foods plus sugar will show a correlation!