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How Bad is Red Meat?
The news isn’t all terrible for those who love a good steak, but even modest portions bring risk
Saeed Alshahrani, a doctoral student at Loma Linda University School of Public Health, recently led a study on the health effects of eating even modest amounts of red meat, and it has both of us rethinking our diets.
Alshahrani and his colleagues were aware of many studies connecting red meat consumption to higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease and other causes. They wanted to look into the risks of eating small amounts. So they turned to a database of information about 96,000 Seventh-day Adventist men and women. Why Adventists? Because about half of them are vegetarians, Alshahrani said, and the rest go light on meat consumption.
Across 11 years, 7,900 of the study subjects had died. Compared to vegetarians, those who ate around 2 ounces of red meat daily — about half a typical hamburger — were 18 percent more likely to die from any cause, and 26 percent more likely to die from cardiovascular disease. The association remained even as other risk factors were taken into account, including smoking, exercise, alcohol use and medical history, the researchers reported March 14 in the journal Nutrients.
