Red meat, is it as bad as its reputation?

Certain food options continue to draw major controversies, some of what you hear is real and some of it are baseless theories. When controversy happens always go back to science, remove bias and look at the evidence and make an educated decision that will support your own longevity journey.

Red meat and risk for cancer:

When it comes to red meat and cancer risk, the major study that drew the conclusion was called the IARC study. This study looked at various meats, and made an association between red meat consumption and cancer risk.  It divided red meant into a category of processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. Both kinds of meat were observed to cause an increase in over all cancer risk with a stronger association noted with the processed meat category. Having said that, what did this study not account for?

1- Other dietary habits. This study did not isolate other potentially bad dietary habits that could be a driver for cancer risk. For example, a lean steak with broccoli, was equally accounted for compared to a burger which likely will be eaten with mayonnaise and french fries. 

2- It clumped pork, lamb, beef, horse, goat meat together, without differentiating grass-fed beef vs corn and grain fed beef.

3- Did not differentiate between methods of cooking, smoking, grilling, frying etc.

How about cardiovascular disease?

A lot of the risk associations came from a few large studies. The Million veterans study concluded that there is a 14% increase risk of cardiovascular disease with unprocessed red meat and 29% increase in processed red meat.

There are major limitations to this large observational study. First, there is no control group, which means, what are we comparing to?

Second, life style factors were self reported by a questionnaire ! It was not something measured or objective. So how do we accurately know that being sedentary, or having other unhealthy eating habits did not contribute to cardiovascular disease? The question remains unanswered !

Finally this study was predominately made of men who were treated at the VA system, which deprives the study from diversity.

On the other hand the PURE study, looked at populations from 21 different countries, from different socioeconomic classes, and found no increased risk with increased red meat consumption. So did socioeconomic factors influence the previous studies? Most likely they did.

This presents the question of self reported success with certain diets like the carnivore diets, so what’s the science behind this diet?

Short answer, there is none.

When people adopt a carnivore diet and see major positive changes in body composition or lipid panels, this likely stems from the switch they made in their food choice. So a person who ate a majority processed food before their carnivore diet will likely see a more pronounced positive effect than a person who mainly ate a Mediterranean diet with minimally processed foods and decided to switch to a carnivore diet.  So what did red meat substitute is what determines the outcome. Future studies could determiner further risk or benefit from adopting these diets, but as it stands now, there is no superiority to this diet over a whole foods based diet.

In conclusion, red meat is very nutrient dense, has major health benefits and given the current data, there is no solid risk association that could be proven with moderate intake of red meat.