Lessons From Sausage

Sausage can teach us many things about life. At its most basic level, a link of sausage is just an oblong sack of meat. Many oblong sacks of meat exist in our world—including fitness professionals conspicuously shaped like sausages—and their contents vary, as do the sacks that cover them.

My dinner last night got me to thinking about all of this. I ate four spicy Italian sausages baked in marinara sauce and smothered in roasted peppers and parmesan cheese. Cutting those babies open revealed chunks of material easily identifiable as freshly ground meat, herbs, and a combination of spices. They were high quality sausages.

Now, compare this to your average frankfurter—referred to here in America as the hot dog. Although they’re similar in appearance to the sausage, the innards of a hot dog are a paste—similar in texture to toothpaste—that’s injected into a casing and congealed in some kind of pressurized, oxygen-free environment. You take a bite, and you’re immediately wondering what the hell you’re actually eating.

The wonderful thing about these mystery meats is that they’re quickly produced, easy to chew, and they go down smoothly. Because of their sleek profile and pre-lubed nature (does anyone even know what they pack these things in?), they could even be used as a nutrient suppository in an emergency. No matter how you look at it, you’re going to ingest a hot dog—and be able to—even if it’s forced on you.

You can think about the news, the media in general, and epidemiological research in exactly the same way. The contents of all of these things don’t really tell us anything about the world, especially when it comes to health and nutrition. A real controlled study—one measuring metabolic components like differences in metabolites against a control or a change in isotope levels derived from the environment—answers questions the same way my spicy Italian sausages revealed a world of truth upon dissection. Epidemiological studies only raise questions that we later need to answer.

Think about sausages and hot dogs the next time you read a piece like this. Nobody quotes research, and the research doctors make reference to are all epidemiological: they show correlations, not causations. Sure, rich kids perform better in school than poor kids—and rich kids also eat breakfast more often. Controlled studies, however, show (as I’ve detailed here) that when all other things are equal, kids perform better academically without breakfast. This, then, forces us to drill deeper: Was it the lack of breakfast, or the lack of carbohydrates for breakfast, that caused the difference? I don’t know. Nobody’s done the research yet.

As Dr. Ames pointed out in our recent interview, epidemiologists try to figure out what can be said of their decades worth of data, only to realize in the end that it doesn’t say anything at all. It only helps us realize how little we actually know.

The next time you’re fed—or force-fed—the hot dog equivalent of research, make sure you cut into it, expose its guts, and discover what you’re being asked to digest. Are you being fed liquefied, nebulous knowledge-paste (the K-Bombs I referred to last week)? If you are, you’d better realize it, then seek information containing that one secret sausage ingredient that elevates the author beyond the level of guru to the level of scientist: the truth about what they’re made of.