Exactly. In a world where people at a big steak dinner once a week, you’d see a similar result.

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.

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.