Red meat is actually good for you!
Red meat and animal proteins are not toxic. This is one of the biggest lies in the field of nutrition.
You may remember this big study that came out some time ago:
“Unprocessed Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption: Dietary Guideline Recommendations From the Nutritional Recommendations (NutriRECS) Consortium”
And this is the link:
This study shows, again, that red meat consumptions is not associated with health issues. We have known this for decades actually, but it is good to newer studies confirm this fact.
Interestingly, a new study just came out:
“Associations of Processed Meat, Unprocessed Red Meat, Poultry, or Fish Intake With Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality”
And the link is:
They author conclude:
“These findings suggest that, among US adults, higher intake of processed meat, unprocessed red meat, or poultry, but not fish, was significantly associated with a small increased risk of incident CVD, whereas higher intake of processed meat or unprocessed red meat, but not poultry or fish, was significantly associated with a small increased risk of all-cause mortality.”
But if you read very carefully the statistics, none of them are significant. A ratio below 2.0 is non-relevant and non-significant. It does not indicate a causative relationship.
All those ratios are below 2.0 and all of them are around 1.0 which indicates a non- relationship.
It is funny to me that based on this study, if you eat some poultry, you have some risks of cardiovascular issues. But if you eat a lot, you do not… This is nonsense!
These observational studies tell us very little about the impact of foods like red meat on individuals like you and me.
Why?
Because they completely ignore context and context is everything!
For example, studies on red meat examine how much red meat people eat over a period of time and correlate that with health outcomes. But they don’t pay any attention to what people eat (and don’t eat) along with the red meat.
For example, in this new study, all the foods that contain red meat were included in the red meat category. For example, hamburgers, pizza, hot dogs, pasta, etc. were all foods included in the red meat category. So, my question is: what about the wheat, sugar, processed ingredients present in them? Don’t they have any impact on the outcome?
Of course, they do!
So, blaming red meat for the results is just pain absurd!
In other words, these studies assume that someone eating red meat in the context of a nutrient-dense, whole-foods diet will have the same health trajectory as someone eating red meat in the context of a standard American diet.
This is ridiculous!
This study shows that, because red meat has been perceived as “unhealthy” for so many years, people who eat more red meat are more likely to:
Smoke
Be physically inactive
Eat fewer fruits and vegetables
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Be less educated
All these factors can have an impact on health and lifespan.
And while some of the better studies do attempt to control for at least some of them, none control for all of them.
This means that, in a study showing a link between red meat consumption and an increased risk of disease, we can’t know that it’s the red meat, and not one of these other factors, that is causing the higher risk.
For far too long, we’ve been stuck in what food philosopher Gyorgy Scrinis calls “nutritionism,” which he defines as:
“the reductive approach of understanding food only in terms of nutrients, food components, or biomarkers, like saturated fats, calories, glycemic index, abstracted out of the context of foods, diets, and bodily processes.”
In other words, it’s a focus on the quantity of certain foods (like red meat) or macronutrients (like fat or carbohydrate), rather than the quality of the overall diet pattern.
One of the inevitable results of the healthy-user bias is that many observational studies end up comparing two groups of people that are not at all similar, and this casts doubt on the findings.
This has led prominent epidemiologists like Stanford professor John Ioannidis to excoriate observational nutrition research.
In a famous paper called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” Ioannidis points out that “claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
You can read this article here:
And in another paper called “The Challenge of Reforming Nutritional Epidemiologic Research,” he said:
“Disentangling the potential influence on health outcomes of a single dietary component from these other variables (e.g. individual genetic background, metabolic profile, other environmental exposures, etc.) is challenging, if not impossible.”
This is why we need to give up the ridiculous idea that doing more of the same observational diet studies is going to eventually give us a definitive answer on how a single food, like red meat, impacts our health.
If you continue to ask the wrong questions, you will continue to get the wrong answers.
The question we should be trying to answer with our research is “what is the overall diet pattern that is most conducive to health”?
Most of us don’t eat just one food. We eat many foods together, in a particular context. That context is what we should be studying.
God bless y’all
Dr. Serge
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