March 24, 2009
Is Eating Red Meat Dangerous to Your Health?
Let me start with a disclaimer: I’m not exactly an unbiased reporter on this subject.
I became a vegetarian when I was 16. Although I’ve morphed into more of a “flexitarian” (eating fish or poultry occasionally) in recent years, I basically never eat red meat. On the other hand, at a catered dinner last month I got my first-ever taste of filet mignon and was blown away by how good it was. It made me wonder if I should start eating beef again.
Now, reading my morning paper, I feel a renewed sense of commitment to those chickpeas in the cupboard. A new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that routinely eating as little as four ounces of red meat (a small hamburger’s worth) each day appears to raise people’s risk of death mortality rate by 30 percent or more! Processed meats such as cold cuts, hot dogs and sausage are also risk-raisers, while poultry and fish actually seem to decrease mortality slightly.
The study incorporated 10 years’ worth of self-reported data from more than half a million 50- to 71-year-olds who participated in the National Institutes of Health-AARP’s Diet and Health Study. Dr. Rashmi Sinha and other researchers at the National Cancer Institute took this data and analyzed it to connect the dots between participants’ meat consumption habits and their risk for heart disease and cancer.
The correlation was especially dramatic among women who were daily red-meat eaters: Their risk of dying from heart disease skyrocketed 50 percent above other women, and their risk of dying from cancer shot up 36 percent. In men, regular consumption of red meat raised the risk of death from heart disease and cancer by 27 and 22 percent, respectively.
Unsurprisingly, the American Meat Institute isn’t swallowing the study, arguing that self-reporting is an
“imprecise approach” and noting other recent studies that appear to challenge the connection between red meat consumption and health risks.
I want to know what you think. Do you eat red meat on a daily basis? If so, will this study change your habits at all?
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10 years worth of self-reported data?!
I’m basically a chicken, fish, and kangaroo eater myself, but I occasionally have brief periods of cow-eating. So this “study” will not change my habits at all.
Amanda – if you do decide to eat beef again, definitely stick to the occasional filet mignon! Otherwise, you might just be disappointed, as it certainly is a wonderful cut!
I usually don’t subscribe to these “___ could kill you” studies about food. There seems to be a new culinary assassin revealed each week.
Even though I’m not positive my two or so servings of red meat each week is “regular” consumption. I ain’t changin’. You can’t beat meat!
A friend just sent me a message objecting to my statement that daily meat consumption “appears to raise people’s risk of death by 30 percent or more.”
He writes:
“People’s risk of death is 100%. Their risk of dying from a specific disease or at an earlier age might be 30% higher, but not their risk of death. No matter if they never put a piece of flesh to their lips, their risk of death will always be 100%.”
Good point! Thanks, Michael. I’ll amend accordingly.
I eat red meat, but I can’t see why it should be necessary to eat it every day given the availability of fish, shellfish, poultry–and chickpeas. It is certainly not the cheapest alternative, nor is the most environmentally friendly alternative, and apparently not the healthiest alternative either.
I love beef (and lamb), but I won’t exactly starve if I don’t eat it every day.
Does the study say anything about the kind of red meat eaten? Portion size? The rest of the diet? The rest of their lifestyle? The kind of person who eats at MacDonalds every day may well be shortening their life expectancy, but you can’t blame it all on the beef. Then again, I eat red meat only very occasionally, but I dare say I could eat more healthily than I do.
In response to Sandra:
The study accounted for a host of variables (age, race, education, marital status, family history of cancer, BMI, smoking history, physical activity, energy intake, alcohol intake, vitamin supplement use, fruit consumption, vegetable consumption, and menopausal hormone therapy among women).
It used three general categories for types of meat (red, white, processed) but I don’t think it got into specifics like where and how the meat was produced (i.e. a fast-food patty versus hormone-free, grass-fed beef). I’d certainly be interested to see an analysis that accounted for those factors as well.
You can read the full study here: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/169/6/562
No. The mere fact of eating red meat once a week does not mean that you’re courting death with every mouthful. In fact, red meat (if you don’t go overboard) is good for you in a variety of ways, not the least of which is that it’s the easiest and most efficient way to get iron in your diet.
(I realize you may not have this problem, but you may in the future. Let me assure you, you do NOT want to have to take an iron supplement. The side effects are worse than the problem. See, your body has a terrible time processing iron taken in pill form, therefore it sheds what it considers to be the excess the same way it sheds excess red blood cells. Trust me, iron supplements cause the most miserable, intractable constipation you have or will ever experience. My doctor’s recommendation is to just eat red meat once in a while.)
I suspect the study was, to say the least, badly designed. For example:
1. What was their general health of ALL the people in the study? Were they given regular and complete physical examinations along with their questionnaires?
2. Was there a control group or groups used? That is, did they compare the overall health and age of vegans, vegetarians, etc. of the study group, matching them?
3. In what form did they eat their meat? (If their consumption was in hamburger form at fast food joints and accompanied by large orders of french fries and sodas, then the data is as nothing.)
4. Were all the people in the study asked for a family medical history going back a couple of generations at least?
Given that the study was done by collating self-reported data, it was utter nonsense. People lie. They lie all the time, especially when they think they know what the people doing the study want to hear. I would guess that a LARGE number of people reported that they “never” or “rarely” eat red meat, when in fact they eat it all the time.
This is just another example of a researcher with an agenda deciding that some common food item is “poison” and creating a study to get the required results. I don’t know how old you are, but surely you remember that white sugar was “poison” for a long time. Based on some pseudo-scientific nonsense, millions of people switched to brown sugar, completely ignorant of the fact that “brown” sugar IS refined white sugar with some of the molasses added back into it for the sake of flavor.
The same thing happened with coffee, tea, white wine, red wine, alcohol in general, all other forms of sugar, chocolate, beans, you name it, it’s been “poison” at one time or another. These things tend to proliferate in the States, and my husband’s theory (with which I agree) is that Americans are ingrained with the Puritanical notion that enjoying anything is bad. If it’s fun, or tastes good, or has no other function than enjoyment, then it must be either forbidden, or somehow scientifically made “good” for us.
Nutritionism is a pseudoscience that vitally depends on data mining (and data manipulation) for its very existence. Comparing heavy red meat eaters with light red meat eaters is comparing apples and oranges: heavy red meat eaters in the US tend to be older, tend to smoke far more, etc. When attempts are made to control for those variables (through multivariate relative risk adjustments) the results tend to be all over the board. Case in point is two studies co-authored by a respected scientists named Willett (look them up), one of which found a statistically insignificant INVERSE correlation between saturated fat consumption and heart disease, and another a statistically significant positive correlation. All using the same data: the 80,000-person Harvard Nurses’ Study. Just using slightly different “adjustments”, ever so slightly manipulated.
As you understand, anything and everything can be proven with these data sets and strategically made risk adjustments, and, of course, it does. I can list a number of studies proving the health benefits of saturated fat consumption and a list of equally well (or poorly) designed studies proving the opposite.
My only piece of advice would be to ignore that peculiarly American breed of charlatans, the dieticians and the nutritionists, and to listen to old-worldy grandmothers and good chefs. They know far better what we should be eating. And yes, we’ll be eating a lot more red meat, butter and lard. Natural, old-fashioned products. Health foods all, as far as I’m concerned.
I agree that red meat is a good source of B12, B6 and iron but I am sure that US and UK produced red meat is very dangerous in large amount as the stressed poor animals have built up bad fat and stress hormones. I only stick to venison while living in the UK as they are leaner and have been running free in the wild and also the UK regulations for beef farmers are poorer than most other european Countries. I am sure beef was much more healthier to eat before it become massproduced. I have heard that US have NO regulations whatsoever or restrictions in animal welfare for farmed animals? This will ofcourse make the meat more dangerous to eat. If you become what you eat then you become a cow full of artificial hormones, fat,stress and boredom if you eat a lot of US produced red meat.