Red Meat Bad For You?  Turns Out, Not So Much!

I love it when Science proves me right.  For years now, I’ve been hunting down and punching in the face anyone who stubbornly insisted on the outdated dogma that red meat is bad for you.

“No, no,” I’d explain, as my blows rained down upon them, “it isn’t red meat that’s the problem.  It’s PROCESSED meat that’s the problem.”

Now, a meta-analysis study published in the journal Circulation is backing me up.  A meta-analysis is where researchers take a whole big giant pile of other research papers and use that data to examine something.   In this case, they sifted through a ton of research studies on red meat and its effects on health and found something interesting.

They found that all these years, most researchers’ conclusions were falling prey to a confounding variable, which is a dirty little detail that throws everything off.  It works sort of like this.  If I see every Ford truck fall on the side of the road because their tires fell off, I might say hey… Fords aren’t so safe.  But, it could be that it’s the TIRES themselves that are the problem, not the entire vehicle.  So it could be that the Michelin Man didn’t do his job and the tires they made for Ford are defective, and Ford vehicles are just fine and dandy… it’s all Michelin’s fault instead.

DISCLAMER.  I think both Ford and Michelin are fine companies and that example shouldn’t be taken as any sort of attack on either company oh PLEASE don’t sue me angry corporate lawyers.

Okay, back to our discussion.  I think we see how a confounding variable works, right?  So the problem with the last few decades of research has been, when researchers found a link between “red meat” and health problems like diabetes or cardiovascular issues, they didn’t pay close enough attention to exactly what was going on.

You see, “red meat” is kind of a broad category.  You could lump steaks, hamburgers, beef hot dogs, and any and all other forms of red meat into this category.  And by just closing your eyes and accepting that broad category as being responsible for health problems, you miss the boat entirely.

What the researchers of this journal article found was that it wasn’t red meat but PROCESSED red meat that seemed to be the culprit behind all these health problems reported over the years. After all, most of the red meat consumed in this country is either highly processed, grain-fed, or eaten mixed in with all kinds of unhealthy crap.    Let’s look at each in turn so we can see where the confusion came from.

Processed Foods

I’ve ranted extensively about the problems with processed foods on many occasions.  To sum it up quickly, any sort of processing makes a normally healthy food into an unhealthy food… usually by adding salt, sugar, and various chemical additives that would downright terrify you if you knew what they did to you biochemically.

So it isn’t that making beef into hot dog form is the problem, it’s the nitrates and salt  and MSG and other gunk they mix in there that causes all of the problems.

Grain-Fed Cattle

Next, by raising cattle in couped-up pens and stuffing them full of grains, you create an unhealthy animal that produces unhealthy meat.  Cattle are grazers by nature; they are evolutionarily designed to meander around, eating grasses of various kinds and occasionally going “moo”.

Cattle that are fattened quickly and cheaply by grains become full of the inflammation-causing Omega-6 fatty acids (which I talk about a lot in articles like this).  So, when you eat them, YOU become full of those Omega-6s, and become prone to inflammation, which leads to the release of a hormone called cortisol that creates all kinds of health problems for you.

Here’s more of a discussion on grass-fed animals vs. corn-fed if you want to know more.

Unhealthy Junk On the Side

While a hamburger patty made with grass-fed beef isn’t so bad for you, the high-glycemic bun, the sugary ketchup, the french fries on the side soaked in trans fats and covered in salt and ketchup, and the insanely sweet soda full of high-fructose corn syrup definitely ARE all bad for you.

Barbeque sauce?  Tons of sugar and other chemicals like MSG.  Really, most of the stuff we stick on the side of eating a good old fashioned chunk of beef is just plain garbage.  So, if researchers see people eating steak covered in barbeque sauce getting fat, they might think “It’s that darn red meat again!  Curse its oily hide!”

When, really, it’s the sugary barbeque sauce that is spiking insulin levels and leading people down the road to diabetes.  Barbeque sauces (or all the other junk food “sides”) are confounding variables.

Healthy Red Meat

So, how exactly DO you eat red meat and not die or get sick from it?  Easy.  Eat it in its most natural state.

Once again, I’ve ranted about a whole foods diet and how it’s the healthiest diet for you in the past.  Basically, the more you process or change a food, the more unhealthy it becomes.

Cattle in their most natural state are grass-fed, free-range animals.  So start there by buying grass-fed meat.  Grass-fed meat has a balanced Essential Fatty Acid profile, meaning it has a healthy ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids.  So, your body won’t get inflammed by having too many Omega-6s, and you won’t have any ill health effects from chronic inflammation.

After that, don’t take that lovely grass-fed meat and start mixing it in with a bunch of junk.  If you stuff it in a sausage casing with a bunch of salt and chemicals, then gee, I guess you’ve made it unhealthy, haven’t you?  And if you cover it in sauces that are full of sugar or eat a bag of chips along with it, again, don’t blame the red meat if you get fat and sick.

To sum it all up, red meat is NOT bad for you.  Only when we start messing with it, do we turn it into something unhealthy.  So stick to a grass-fed steak… and stay healthy!

Source article reference:  Micha R, Wallace SK, et al.  Red and processed meat consumption and risk of incident coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes mellitus: a systematic review and meta-analysis.  Circulation, June 2010;1;121 (21): 2271-83.