At Darwin’s Table

I recently read this post at Health Habits regarding a study that showed increased risk of mortality with increased meat consumption. Naturally I wanted a chance of rebuttal. Here it is…

First of all I thought I better sum up the study. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute in the USA tracked 500,000 people aged 50-71 years for a 10 year period. Five groups were defined and ranked on meat consumption. The studies findings showed that the highest ranked group (i.e. biggest meat eaters – approx 62.5g per 1000 cals a day) had a modestly increased chance of dying, contracting heart disease and cancer compared to that group that ate the least amount of meat (approx 9.8g per 1000 calories per day).

This study has been widely cited on the internet and a lot of noise is been made to clamp down on meat consumption. My major problem with this study is they have not seperated out processed meats from grass fed meats. There is a BIG difference between eating a hamburger pattie from a grain fed cow and eating a steak from a grass fed cow. In fact many studies show links between processed meats and heart disease, cancer, etc but no study that I know of has shown any link between grass fed beef and increased heart disease or cancer. Such a study of course would be almost impossible because your typical ‘red meat eater’ does not cut out processed meats. Even in countries like New Zealand where meat is all grass fed it is also still processed. So seperating red meat eaters from processed meat eaters is impossible and very misleading when you read a study that says that eating red meat is bad for your health.

It is also interesting that the statistical differences were between the two extremes – biggest meat eaters vs smallest meat eaters. The difference did not increase along a gradient. The group eating the most meat are probably also big on eating lots of processed carbs, such as hamburger buns, fries etc. The group eating the least meat I would suspect are likely to be more concerned about their health, and also consume a higher rate of unprocessed foods such as vegetables.  So are these differences really to do with meat intake at all? I would certainly suggest that been a vegetarian that eats unprocessed foods is more healthy than eating hamburgers and hot dogs. Until a study comes out that specifically isolates grass fed meat from processed meat, and then still shows a higher rate of mortality in the meat eating group, I will be completely dismissive of such studies.

The group that also ate the least meat ate the most fibre. This was linked with a decrease in colectoral cancer and of course lots of fibre was considered to be the reason for this. However, Australians eat a higher amount of fibre than Americans but show higher rates of colectoral cancer also. So is fibre the cause? The problems with such studies is that there are so many variables and its almost impossible to isolate them. Therefore, they should be taken with extreme caution. I remember reading a study in New Zealand, which also showed that the white population ate a higher amount of meat and this was linked with higher incidences of stomach cancer than polynesian groups. Of course the white population also ate more vegetables and are we going to claim that vegetables cause cancer? This little titbit of information just happened to be mentioned ever so briefly and glossed over. As I said….too many damn variables.