Eating red meat increases your chances of dying prematurely. That's the stark finding of a very large and very well done clinical study just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The study found that eating red and processed meat was associated with increases in total mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality. They found that eating just 4 ounces of red meat a day raises your overall risk of dying prematurely, raises your risk of dying from cancer and raises your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. I'd say that means it's time to decrease your consumption of red meat, which includes beef, pork and processed meats like sausage, bacon and cold cuts.
There are a number of reasons why eating red meat might be bad for your health. Red meat is loaded with cholesterol and saturated fat. The cooking of red meat produces cancer-causing compounds. Red meat contains a lot of iron, which is believed to promote cancer growth. Processed meats contain a variety of cancer-causing chemicals. Eating red meat is associated with high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol, which in turn increase the risk of heart and cardiovascular disease.
You don't have to eliminate red meat entirely. Instead, you should avoid eating it every day. According to Dr. Walter Willet, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, who was quoted in The Washington Post,"You can be very healthy being a vegetarian, but you can be very healthy being a non-vegetarian if you keep your red-meat intake low," Willett said. "If you are eating meat twice a day and can cut back to once a day there's a big benefit. If you cut back to two or three times a week there's even more benefit. If you eliminate it entirely, there's a little more benefit, but the big benefit is getting away from everyday red-meat consumption."
Writing in an accompanying editorial in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Barry Popkin, of the University of North Carolina, agreed with Dr. Willett's assessment that you don't necessarily need to become a vegetarian, "Rather, the need is for a major reduction in total meat intake, an even larger reduction in processed meat and other highly processed and salted animal source food products, and a reduction in total saturated fat." He did note, however, that "there are many scholars who would argue for the strong nutritional benefits of [a vegetarian diet] or at least a major shift toward more of a Mediterranean diet with minimal red meat intake."
Not only would cutting back on red meat consumption be good for your personal health, it would also be good for the health of the planet. That's because the industrial production of meat uses a lot of natural resources (far more than growing fruits and vegetables), uses a tremendous amount of water, creates a lot of pollution (including water pollution from runoff of waste and chemicals, and increased greenhouse gases from all the methane gas excreted by the animals), requires huge amounts of pesticides on the plants (such as corn) grown to feed the animals, and requires the use of all sorts of antibiotics to keep disease down (with the resulting increase in bacterial resistance). Dr. Popkin was further quoted in The Washington Post as saying ""There's a big interplay between the global increase in animal food intake and the effects on climate change. If we cut by a few ounces a day our red-meat intake, we would have big impact on emissions and environmental degradation."
Bad for your health, bad for the environment. It's time to reduce your consumption of red meat.