Scientific Evidence on Red Meat and Health

The theory that red meat is bad for human health and causes obesity, diabetes, heart
disease, cancer and even premature death is not substantiated by rigorous science.

The newly released EAT-Lancet report, as many reports before it, have managed to cast
red meat as the nutritional boogeyman by relying on a weak kind of science:
epidemiology.

A prominent example of this was the World Health Organization’s 2015 designation of
red meat as a carcinogen (for colorectal cancer). But this decision depended entirely upon
epidemiological data which showed that the “relative risk” of getting this cancer for red
meat eaters, compared to non-meat eaters, was only 1.17 to 1.18. Relative risks below 2
are generally considered in the field of epidemiology to be too small to establish a
reliable correlation.

This is the kind of weak science upon which the EAT-Lancet report is based.

The fact is, there is no evidence to back up claims that red meat is bad for health.
Randomized controlled trials on humans, considered the gold standard of scientific
research, do not support the idea that red meat causes any kind of disease.

On the saturated fats in meat:

The two largest-ever NIH-funded, multi-center clinical trials (the Women’s Health
Initiative and the Minnesota Coronary Survey) where saturated fats were replaced by
unsaturated fats, on nearly 54,000 men and women, concluded that saturated fats had no
effect on cardiovascular mortality or total mortality. A large meta-analysis of all clinical
trials on saturated fats came to the same conclusion.

On red meat and cancer:

Two large NIH-funded, multi-center clinical trials on altogether more than 50,000 men
and women who significantly cut back on red-meat consumption (while increasing fruits,
vegetables and grains) did not see any risk reduction for polyp re-occurrence or any kind
of cancer.

On red meat and heart disease:

Two meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (in the Journal of Clinical
Lipidology and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) both found that red meat had
either neutral or positive effects on most cardiovascular outcomes (blood pressure,
cholesterol and other lipids).

On red meat and type 2 diabetes:

Red meat cannot possibly cause diabetes, because glucose (sugar) is the principal driver
of type 2 diabetes, and meat contains no glucose. Moreover, red meat availability has
dropped dramatically as diabetes has skyrocketed, making any proposed connection
between red meat and diabetes self-evidently unreasonable.
 Red meat availability (g/day/per capita) vs Incidence of diabetes

Incidence of T2 diabetes

Availability of red meat

diabetes

Epidemiology has given us some spectacular health failures over recent decades:
hormone replacement therapy, anti-oxidant vitamins and caps on dietary cholesterol, to
name a few.

Read the EAT Lancet report with great caution, as it lacks any kind of scientific rigor and
only serves to misguide Americans on their nutritional health.

Here are the facts about epidemiology

At best, epidemiological studies can show only association and cannot establish
causation, which means that the data can be used to suggest hypotheses but not to prove
them. Observational studies that link nutrition with disease generally find tiny differences
in risk (relative risks of 1-2) which are not enough to generate confidence that an
association is real.

Epidemiological studies rely on self-reported food surveys which can often be imprecise.
Researchers from the Mayo Clinic tested "memory-based dietary assessment methods"
and found that the nutritional data collected was "fundamentally and fatally flawed.”

Only a small number of nutritional related epidemiological studies are ultimately

confirmed by more rigorous scientific studies. In 2005, Stanford’s John Ioannidis
analyzed several dozen highly cited studies and concluded that subsequent clinical trials
could only reproduce around 20% of observational findings. A 2011 paper published by
Significance analyzed 52 claims made in nutritional studies, and none—0%—withstood
the scrutiny of subsequent clinical trials.