No, Eating Red Meat Will NOT Raise Your Risk of Early Death

However, smoking, lack of exercise, and listening to the NIH will.

The other day I came upon a 2017 BMJ anti-meat article by Arash Etemadi and colleagues from the US government’s National Cancer Institute in Maryland.

The NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and like most government ‘health’ agencies, is committed to spreading the fallacy that meat is a carcinogenic, artery-clogging poison.

The NIH, by the way, are the same pack of profiteering criminals who collaborated with Moderna to produce and promote a highly toxic mRNA gene therapy.

So in the world of NIH, nutritious meat = deadly, deadly gene therapies = “safe and effective.”

Assholes.

The Etemadi et al article caught my eye because it was accompanied by an editorial making the ridiculous claim that “producing 1 kg of meat protein requires more than 110 000 L of water.” This is a patently false claim so easily debunked anyone issuing it should be stripped of all tertiary qualifications and made to sweep factory floors for a living.

I’ll thoroughly dismantle this and other ridiculous claims made for the water burden of beef production in my next post. Today, I want to discuss the Etemadi article itself, because it provides a lucid example of just why modern anti-meat research is a load of highly misleading nonsense.

Given who they work for, it should come as little surprise that Etemadi et al claimed:

“An increased risk of all cause mortality (hazard ratio for highest versus lowest fifth 1.26) and death due to nine different causes associated with red meat intake was observed. Both processed and unprocessed red meat intakes were associated with all cause and cause specific mortality.”

This nonsensical claim was based upon the usual hopelessly confounded and sloppy epidemiological rot that we’re all supposed to pretend has the same validity as tightly controlled RCTs.

The NCI crew used baseline dietary data from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study involving 536,969 people from six states and two metropolitan areas in the US followed for 16 years.

So right away we know this study is pure garbage, because they used answers from a single dietary survey at the start of the study as proof of the participants’ daily diet for the next sixteen years!

Laughably, or sadly depending on your predisposition, then-BMJ editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee writes in her solemn editorial, “Although its main findings are based on a single dietary assessment, a subgroup had two assessments done on separate occasions, and these associations were if anything stronger.”

Two assessments done on separate occasions, huh?

From the paper: “to correct the estimates of daily red meat intake in the entire cohort for measurement error, we used data from a subset of participants with two non-consecutive 24 hour dietary recalls (n=1877).”

This is the kind of garbage that passes for ‘research’ these days. Two dietary recalls, covering a collective period of 48 hours, retrieved from 1,877 participants, were again deemed accurate representations of daily food intake among 536,969 people for a sixteen-year period.

That right there is the height of pseudoscience, but made-to-order junk science is the entire point of modern epidemiology.

Like all the previous episloppyology claiming an ‘association’ between red meat and everything from cancer to jock itch, the Etemadi et al farce was hopelessly and blatantly confounded.

Subjects were divided into quintiles according to their initial claimed red meat intake.

The baseline data shows that as red meat intake increased, so too did the prevalence of non-meat factors that impact health and longevity.

As meat intake rose, so did the proportion of males in each quintile. It’s no secret that women, on average, live longer than men.

The number of never smokers linearly declined with increasing meat intake, while the number of current or recent smokers increased in step with increasing meat intake.

Vigorous physical activity also declined significantly with increasing meat intake.

As meat consumption increased, so did the percentage of subjects with lower education and socioeconomic levels.

Increasing meat intake was also accompanied by higher caloric intake, higher BMI, lower fruit and vegetable intake.

In other words, those who ate the most meat were more likely to be male, to smoke, to be overweight, and to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They were less likely to engage in vigorous exercise.

These are all well-established health risk factors, and they have nothing to do with meat consumption. What their increasing prevalence does reflect is the pervasive anti-meat brainwashing that Western populations have been subjected to over the last several decades. Health-conscious people and those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds tend to believe the anti-meat BS, and so are more likely to add red meat restriction or avoidance to their repertoire of health-enhancing behaviors.

Etemadi et al never presented the data, but if they asked about sleep habits, processed food intake, and recreational drug use, they very likely would have found poorer sleep, poorer overall diet, and greater drug use among the higher quintiles of meat intake.

That’s not the fault of red meat. I’ve never met a steak that asked me to stop exercising, start smoking, do drugs, and eat more crap, and I’ve never heard of red meat asking anyone else to do the same.

When you conduct an epidemiological study in the West - an activity that tends to trigger the “healthy participant effect” - you attract a population whose behaviors will produce misleading results.

What none of the anti-meat propagandists and zealots want to discuss is that when you look at whole-country consumption data, or prospective cohort studies conducted outside of the wokey dope West, the association between red meat and negative health outcomes disappears.

Non-Western populations don’t engage in the same kind of navel-gazing, pseudoscientific wankery that we do in the West. As Venezuelan comedian Ivan Aristeguieta quipped after observing the bizarre phenomenon of Western meat avoidance, “There are no vegans in Venezuela. If you are vegan in Venezuela, you die!”

Non-Western populations have not been subjected to the tsunami of anti-meat propaganda that we have been flooded with in the West. As a result, the Western correlation between increasing meat intake and poorer health behaviors does not exist in those countries.

Lo and behold, those countries also show no correlation with higher meat intakes and poorer health and longevity outcomes.

A review of prospective cohort studies from countries like Japan, Bangladesh, China, Korea and Taiwan - with follow-up periods of up to 15.6 years - showed red meat is not associated with any increased risk of ill health or mortality. In fact, statistically significant risk reductions were found with higher red meat consumption and CVD mortality in men, and cancer mortality in women.

A recent and extensive review of 175 countries and territories (covering 90% of the world’s population) found a "significant and strong" positive correlation with meat intake and life expectancy, which remained after factoring for other variables.

In addition, child mortality showed an inverse relationship with meat consumption.

Meat intake was correlated with life expectancy in different population groupings regardless of cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, meat intake level and geographic location.

Noted the non-woke researchers, "populations with lower percentage of vegetarians have greater life expectancy, though the relationship is only marginally significant likely due to small sample size."

Anyone who tells you that the world’s most nutrient-dense food - red meat - is somehow harmful to you simply has no clue what they are talking about.