关于红肉的思考与习作，似乎是解决了文末的逻辑问题

andyvictorUID: 2430551

Argument142 【还有4天就考试了，能不能帮忙修改一下啊？】
TOPIC: ARGUMENT142 - The article entitled 'Eating Iron' in last month's issue of Eating for Health reported that a recent study found a correlation between high levels of iron in the diet and an increased risk of heart disease. Further, it is well established that there is a link between large amounts of red meat in the diet and heart disease, and red meat is high in iron. On the basis of the study and the well-established link between red meat and heart disease, we can conclude that the correlation between high iron levels and heart disease, then, is most probably a function of the correlation between red meat and heart disease.
WORDS: 430
TIME: 00:34:33
DATE: 2010/2/28 15:34:15

This argument appears to be well-presented by citing the study results, and the relationship between red meat and heart disease and the fact that red meat generally contains high level of iron. However, it turns out to be logically flawed if we take a closer scrutiny on it.

First of all, although there is a linkage between large amounts of red meat, which is high in iron in the diet, and heart disease, the arguer cannot hence justify the cause-and-effect relationship between iron and heart disease. For the first reason, it is possible that such a diet also contains other elements and ingredients that may actually cause heart disease. Therefore, more detailed and scientific investigation should be made to separately examine the effect of iron, such as to set several control groups who eat different food, all of which contain high iron but differ in other elements. Without doing this, the arguer's conclusion is unconvincing.

Moreover, even if the iron can cause people who add a large amount of red meal in their diet to be risky of having heart disease, the iron might come from somewhere else, such as the iron knife, iron spoon and most likely the iron pan, where iron is in their element form. Meanwhile, it is very likely that the
iron in red meat are in different forms, such as in its compound form. Since common sense tells us an element might have different properties in different forms, and the arguer provides with no evidence which form of iron caused the heart disease, we cannot hastily accuse iron in the red meat of their function in inducing heart disease.

Even granted that iron in red meat should be attributed to the cause of heart disease, we still cannot judge whether iron is solely responsible for that. The arguer neglects the alternative explanation that iron and some other ingredients in red meat jointly contribute to the consequences, and iron serves as the catalyst. For that matter, without those ingredients iron would not lead to, and even would mitigate heart disease.
In this sense, the correlation between high iron levels and heart disease (perhaps a negative relation or no relation at all) would not be a function of the correlation between red meat and heart disease (a positive relation as the fact cited indicates).

To sum up, there are myriad of alternatives that can explain why red meat would cause higher heart disease rate. Without considering and ruling out these alternatives, to establish a causal relation between high iron levels and heart disease would be too presumptuous.

andyvictorUID: 2430551

咋缩进去了呢。。