It's been all over the news lately: a Harvard study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine last week links red meat consumption to increased mortality. But is that reason enough to give up meat altogether, or is all about moderation... and the kind of meat you eat?
The study—which involved 121,342 men and women who filled out health and diet questionnaires between 1980 and 2006—found that a daily increase of three ounces of red meat was associated with a 12 percent greater risk of dying over all, including "a 16 percent greater risk of cardiovascular death and a 10 percent greater risk of cancer death," as The New York Times reported. The stats worsened with processed meat.
While the evidence seems strong (indeed both The New York Times and the LA Times published dramatic titles around the study), critics of the study say that there was no adequate accounting for other lifestyle factors. (Indeed, researchers note that "people who ate more red meat were less physically active and more likely to smoke and had a higher body mass index," according to the Times.) Additionally, while the researchers did distinguish between processed and unprocessed meat, they didn't differentiate between industrial and non-industrial, grass-fed and pastured meat. Scientist and San Francisco foodie Darya Pino finds this an important point, especially "when considering cancer mortality, since toxic compounds tend to accumulate in the fat of animals."
It also seems that moderation is the key. NPR notes that "the study found that people who replaced one serving of red meat with alternative sources of protein decreased their risks of premature death. Choosing chicken and other poultry decreased the risk by 14 percent, fish decreased the risks by 7 percent and legumes decreased the risk by 10 percent."
Read the Study: Red Meat Consumption and Mortality | The Archives of Internal Medicine
For more on the study and the reaction to it, read the following articles:
• Risks: More Red Meat, More Mortality | The New York Times
• No Surprise: Meat Is Bad For You | Mark Bittman
• Red Meat is Killing Us All... or Not | Summer Tomato
• Death By Bacon? Study Finds Eating Meat Is Risky | NPR
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It's all bull.
"Eating red meat will kill you" is a nice headline and has certainly been fun for the media.
Here is a more considered piece than I could ever write:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/will-eating-red-meat-kill-you/
My question would be who funded the report.
Thank you, Britalian! I was just going to come post the same link.
Honestly, this study is a bunch of bull that was meant to garner headlines and scare quotes. Check the link below for a nice take-down of the methodology.
"This study didn’t prove that red meat was bad, because it didn’t prove anything at all — except that predominantly white health professionals die less often than the average person, and that while the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health can easily drum up media attention, they are not easily embarrassed."
http://www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/red-meat-and-mortality-this-ones-for-you/
You know what really leads to increased mortality?
Being alive.
This MIT science blog also critiques the study: http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/2012/03/16/the-red-meat-scare/
This is an excellent example of READ THE STUDY, and irresponsible reporting on the initialriter's part.
http://www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/red-meat-and-mortality-this-ones-for-you/
"The study—which involved 121,342 men and women who filled out health and diet questionnaires"
Because no one ever lies on a health questionnaire...
Also, the inherent problem with questionnaires is the lack of a control group.
An entire article, links to LA and NY Times, 8 comments and not one link to the **actual** study? What is happening to science journalism these days?
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/archinternmed.2011.2287
ATN654, what do you mean a control group for the questionnaire? The control group in this case would be individuals who do not eat red-meat.
And, although there have been some studies showing dishonest answers on questionnaire completion, the frequency of dishonesty is greatly diminished in a setting like the one in the paper, where individuals are knowingly anonymized, and do not have to face judgement of any sort.
Overall, there are important facts in this study, however the media has taken it to a degree of sensationalism that has degraded the importance.
It's very misleading to say that there was "no adequate accounting" for lifestyle factors. The researchers controlled for these variables (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlling_for_a_variable if you don't know what this is). While it's possible that they didn't fully account for all possible lifestyle differences between the groups, they attempted to, and at least covered the major differences.
Also, that study found that replacing red meat with nuts led to a 19% decrease, which was more than for all other meats/fish and legumes. It's curious that you didn't mention this.
See this article for more information: http://www.livescience.com/18996-red-meat-premature-death.html
Hilariously, I originally thought this headline read, "Strong Link Between Red Meat and MORALITY." I was like, "What wackjob funded THAT study?" Lol.
As a science major, I feel compelled to comment. The study doesn't have a control group because it's a correlational study, not a true experiment. A true experiment would randomly assign people to groups that ate varying amounts of red meat, including eating no red meat, which would be the control group. Then any differences in mortality among the groups could quite confidently be attributed to red meat consumption. Now, as you can imagine, this kind of study would be nearly impossible to actually do, because most people don't take kindly to being told what to eat for decades, and if the researchers had reason to believe red meat consumption did increase mortality, it would be unethical to purposefully get people to increase their red meat consumption.
So this study doesn't demonstrate that eating red meat causes increased mortality, but just that there's an association between eating a lot of red meat and having an increased risk of dying. It could be that there's a genetic factor that makes people like red meat more, but also increases the chance of getting cancer, or heart disease.
There are a lot of better reasons to limit red meat consumption, such as the appalling way we treat most animals that are raised for food, the fact that it just isn't a very efficient food source, and that compared to other countries, Americans eat much more than our fair share of meat.
Sorry for the long rant, but misunderstanding/misapplying scientific research slows down progress for all of us, even though this study's findings are ones that I would really like to believe (full disclosure: I'm a vegetarian).
Adding to what KRDavis said, we are lucky enough to have the full study free for us to read. Yet no one, not ny times, la times nor kitchn bothered to post a link to the actual study. This is bad reporting. Read the study and see they did add qualifiers and caveats which are not nearly as simplistic as reported. See my previous comment for the link.
Ah, either I missed it or kitchn added it in. If the former, my apologies. But neither newspaper I mentioned seemed to link to it!!
Seems like people are misconstruing the conclusion of this study. You can't claim causality from a survey. That's stats 101. All you can do is claim an association, and this study claimed an association. Which is different from saying that A causes B. Or to say that A is associated with B 100% of the time. They just found an association that put their sample at higher risk for CVD and cancer. You have to be careful to expand the findings beyond that and apply it to the whole population. It seems that some critics are misunderstanding the conclusion.
Plus, the statistics that came from the sample are even adjusted for multivariate lurking variables. So lifestyle and diet are accounted for, along with other variables. I'm not saying that we should completely dismiss their study but it's important to be cautious that 1 study does not make it law and no researcher involved made that claim.
"You know what really leads to increased mortality?
Being alive." THAT'S WHAT I'M SAYING.
I really thought everyone knew this already. I love living in my vegan nutritionist bubble.