A lot of this reporting is a big misunderstanding of statistics.

As the study says

About 45% of the population had zero beef consumption on any given day, whereas the 12% of disproportionate beef consumers accounted for 50% of the total beef consumed

Now just as a thought experiment, do you think that almost half of the US never eats any beef? No, of course not. But on any given day? Sure, quite possible. People's diets vary.

A randomly selected person might have a McDonald's hamburger for lunch and a steak for dinner and be part of the 12% on the first day but then eat mushroom ravioli for lunch and pizza for dinner on the second day and be part of the 45%.

And there might be certain demographics that are more likely to make up that 12% on a given day but that doesn't mean there's a particular nonchanging group of high consumers.

I'm not going to dig into the study here but just as an example, let's say Dog Breed X is 1.5 times more likely to bark than Dog Breed Y is. You can't hear a dog bark and say "Ah it must be Breed X then!", you can only say "Ah, it's more likely from Breed X than Breed Y".

Yo this is gross af

My dad-in-law ate casseroles and steak for half a century until his heart almost exploded.

Now he only eats cobb salads and monte cristos

IMO, those people eat about 4 times the average amount

if we put these people to a vegan diet and everyone else cut out their meat by a good 50% we can probably fix a lot of issues from ecology to diet, then we can move on to pressing matters

If I'm reading it correctly, the abstract says they looked at participants' self reported 24 hour diet, and pegged the beef intake to calories eaten. Does anyone know where one might find data on diets reported over say, a month?