A new study has been released by the Archives of Internal Medicine that shows a correlation between eating high amounts of red meat and early death. In this study white meat has been shown to have the opposite effect and has shown a decreased risk of premature death.
I eat low carb diet for health and fatloss. Red meat is a big part of my diet and I do feed it to my family. So this study was interesting to me.
Since reading the book Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes I have seen these kinds of studies in a different light. Basically there are a lot of published papers (and wasted money) that are nothing but junk science and this study could just be classified under that category.
What they did with this study is take 545,000 people ages 50-71 and followed them for ten years. The participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire and estimate from memory the amount of red meat, white meat and processed meat that they ate. It is really hard to acquire reliable information from older people who may or may not have memory slip-ups.
The death rate increase (from cancer and heart disease) for those that ate the most red meat: 31% for men and 36% for women. That may sound alarming.
This study has the Canadian Cancer Society all excited about the findings and will start asking people to reduce their red meat intake.
But wait a minute here…
Is it really the red meat that is the cause of increased death or can it be some other factors that are the cause of the increased death?
Smoking was the largest confounder of the association between meat intake and mortality. Physical activity and education were also important covariates, but not to the same degree as smoking.
During 10 years of follow-up, there were 47 976 male deaths and 23 276 female deaths. In general, those in the highest quintile of red meat intake tended to consume a slightly lower amount of white meat but a higher amount of processed meat compared with those in the lowest quintile. Subjects who consumed more red meat tended to be married, more likely of non-Hispanic white ethnicity, more likely a current smoker, have a higher body mass index, and have a higher daily intake of energy, total fat, and saturated fat, and they tended to have lower education and physical activity levels and lower fruit, vegetable, fiber, and vitamin supplement intakes.
The scientist noted that the people who ate the most red meat also had other unhealthy habits such as smoking, excess weight, higher caloric intake, lack of exercise and lower vitamin and antioxidant intake through supplements and diet. They also had a higher intake of processed meats. Processed meats are junk food and contain sodium nitrites which are carcinogenic. And it isn’t a far stretch if these participants ate processed meats and lower levels of fresh produce that the other foods in their diets would be highly processed refined grain products. Their fiber was low and that means they had low intake of whole grains. The other issue is the overweight which means the participants had some sort of insulin problems. Insulin problems can lead to some sort of chronic illness and therefore death.
So is it really the high red meat in the diet that causes early death? NO. It is the other unhealthy habits that are the real killer. They did not mention alcohol intake here and that can also play a major role in disease and death.
Yet the researchers and media are focused on the spreading the word of junk science.
