Red Meat Increases Death Risk

Sanjeev posted this in News on March 31st, 2009

There is a new research report from US that says that people who eat the most red meat (beef and pork) and the most processed meat (cold cuts and luncheon meats, hot dog, bacon, sausage from both Red and White meat) have the highest overall risk of death from all causes, including heart disease and cancer.

The study carried out by the National Cancer Research Institute is one of the largest to look at the highly controversial and emotive issue of whether eating red meat is indeed bad for health. Those who eat meat will, I am sure decry the report while the animal rights activists will use it to convince the meat eaters to become more “humane”!

Predictably the meat industry has denounced the study as flawed!!

The study done by Rashmi Sinha (Senior Investigator with the Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics Division of the National Cancer Institute) and her colleagues looked at the records of more than 500,000 people aged 51 to 70 who filled out questionnaires on their diet and other health habits.

Even when other factors were accounted for – body mass index, family history of cancer, alcohol intake, education, smoking, dietary factors such as eating fresh fruits and vegetables, smoking, exercise, and obesity – the heaviest meat eaters were more likely to die over the next 10 years than the people who ate the least amount of meat. This is in conformance to my view that excess of everything is bad. The best statement that I have ever heard on this aspect is that “Poison is not about quality but about quantity.” Everything in the world is poisonous if taken in excess. Water which constitutes 70% of our body and without which we cannot live is also poisonous if we consume water in excess (15% of our body weight).

It is thought (though one is not completely sure) that the increased risk could be because of various different mechanisms that could be related such as the iron. Red meat has more iron and hemoglobin, myoglobin. It could also be the type of fat and the amount of fat. Another factor could be the way that meats are cooked. At high temperature you get production of many different compounds and it could be the way meats are processed and have things added to it.

“Red and processed meat intakes were associated with modest increases in total mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality.” Sinha and colleagues wrote in the Archives of the Internal Medicine.

They divided the volunteers into five groups called quintile. Between 1995 and 2005, 47976 men and 23276 women died. The quintile that ate the most red meat (top 20%) had a higher risk for overall death – death from heart disease and cancer – than the men and women who ate the least red meat (bottom 20%).

The researchers said that thousands of deaths could be prevented if people simply ate less meat. According to the study red meat had an increased risk of 31 per cent for total mortality in men and 36 per cent in women. Cancer had 22 per cent of mortality for men and 20 per cent in women and for white meat it was eight per cent less. For overall mortality, 11% of deaths in men and 16% of deaths in women could be prevented if people decreased their red meat consumption to the level of intake in the first quintile (bottom 20%),” Sinha’s team wrote.

Many studies have previously shown that people who eat less meat are healthier in many ways, and Sinha’s team noted that meat contains several cancer causing chemicals, as well as the unhealthiest forms of fat. It would therefore mean that the plank of health cannot really be taken to get people off meat eating habit. If people were to simply reduce their intake of flesh, they can hope to remain reasonable healthy. And as far as meat containing cancer causing chemicals and bad fat is concerned, its bad effects would also show up in case of excess consumption only. And today’s farming which is over dependant on fertilizers and pesticides too contain harmful chemicals. One of the most lucid explanations about the ills of processed foods, I found in an eBook titled “Truth About Abs” by Mike Geary.

The best reason for not eating meat comes from Barry Popkin, an expert in nutrition and economics at the University of North Carolina, who said that the study was unusually thorough and careful. “Eating less meat has other benefits, he said, for instance, farming animals for meat causes green house gas emissions that warm the atmosphere and uses fresh water in excess,” he said. According to him he was pretty surprised when he checked back and went through the data on emissions from animal food and livestock and found it to be more than cars!! And that is the positive reason for giving up on meat in our diet.

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