New Research on the Health Impacts of Red Meat
Today is about shocking new research on the health effects of red meat. We have been told for decades that red meat is not good for us, and lots of people have complained that there has not been a separation between processed red meat and unprocessed red meat.
Often what you'll find when they talk about red meat is that they lump in sausage rolls and pies and things like salami and bacon with unprocessed red meat, such as a piece of steak. Well, there's a recent study that was published in the journal Nature Medicine. The name of the study is 'Health Effects Associated with Consumption of Unprocessed Red Meat a burden of Proof study.'
Now, this paper is important for two reasons. Number one, it's just looking at unprocessed red meat. Pretty much everybody accepts that processed red meat is bad for your health and can significantly increase your risk of certain diseases, particularly colorectal cancer seems to be the strongest, however.
But that next part of the title, 'a burden of proof study,' is really important. The reason is that it’s important that you need to wind back a little bit and look at a study or a couple of studies or a series called The Global Burden of Disease Studies. These are highly respected studies that came out looking at the things that are in our environment that have the biggest impact on disease.
For a little bit of detail, what they do in these studies is look at a number of different things that contribute to overall disease burdens. And in these studies, they've looked at the significant dietary risk factors. In 2017, the Global Burden of Disease Analysis attributed 25,000 deaths worldwide and 1.3 million disability adjusted life years (DALY) to red meat.
If we just bear that in mind, in 2017, they said that 25,000 deaths and 1.3 million DALYs were attributed to red meat, and red meat intake was the least important of 15 dietary factors that they estimated.
Fast forward to 2019, the study attributed that a diet high in red meat was responsible for 896,000 deaths and 23.9 million DALYs, and had jumped from the 15th most important dietary risk factor right up to the fifth dietary risk factor. Also in 2019, with no justification whatsoever, the Global Burden of Disease Analysis completely changed the goalposts and decided to reduce the theoretical minimum risk exposure level I-E-A safe intake level of red
meat to zero, absolutely zero. This move prompted a number of highly respected researchers to write to The Lancet and publish their criticism of it and questioned its justification.
Now, how you can take any component of the ancestral human diet that we have eaten for all of our existence, whether it be red meat or fruit and vegetables, say or reset with no evidence whatsoever that the safe exposure level is now zero. The researchers pointed out that the results when they changed the goalposts were in complete contradiction to most of the available evidence.
Moving forward to this new study, which was carried out by the same group that was behind the Global Burden of Disease study and they're called the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. What they did in this burden of proof study is basically like the justice system you are innocent until proven guilty.
Rather than go 'we're going to arbitrarily set the CF intake at zero.' They used updated and quite sophisticated statistics, which hopefully becomes a precedent for other researchers. The statistical manipulations or statistics that different researchers use can explain a lot of the discrepancies that we see in the research.
What did they find whenever they used this new method of a burden of proof? Well, to quote their paper, 'We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer.' That statement is in contrast to processed red meat.
There was also weak evidence of the association between unprocessed red meat and breast
cancer, type two diabetes and ischemic heart disease. They go on to say, moreover, 'We find no evidence of association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke. We also found that while risk for the six outcomes in our analysis combined was minimised at 0 gram of unprocessed red meat intake a day, the 95%
uncertainty level that incorporated between study heterogeneity was very wide from zero to 200 grams a day.'
To simplify, it means that basically, in theory, if you eat 0 gram of unprocessed red meat, you might minimise your risk. However, they cannot say that with any degree of scientific certainty because the 95% uncertainty level is pretty key. Basically, if anything's below that, we say that it doesn't have reasonable evidence.
They're saying that anything from 0 gram to 200 grams a day can't be certain that there's any difference. Now, they went on to say that while there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations.
That is the latest update on red meat. Processed red meat, we all know not good. But now unprocessed red meat would appear to have not very strong evidence at all as to any risk of it, up to about 200 grams a day, which is a whopping amount of red meat. But what it really means is that there shouldn't be any government guidelines or other guidelines from whether they're dieticians groups or heart foundation or whatever group.
It may be that there should not be public recommendations based around minimising consumption of unprocessed red meat. Now, whether you choose to eat red meat or not is entirely up to you. If you do like steak, the latest research would say you can probably have it guilt free.
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