Researchers from the University of Washington are pushing back against the prevailing belief that red meat consumption is linked to health conditions like cancer and heart disease.
The medical community has long associated eating red meat with a host of illnesses. These conclusions, however, were based on incomplete and lazy research, according to the team of scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
Past research entailed analyzing red meat consumption levels and drawing conclusions based on the preponderance of diseases that manifested. The problem, however, is that the studies would not isolate the theorized cause from other potentially more impactful factors.
For example, while it may be true that individuals eating more red meat also experience higher levels of cancer, red meat may not be the source of the condition. Perhaps red meat eaters happen to smoke more than the average person. It may be the cigarettes, not the red meat, causing illness. Or, it may be both.
In other words, the correlation was potentially erroneously considered as causation.
The authors of the latest findings scoured and analyzed years of data looking at the impact of red meat on health outcomes.
“We found weak evidence of [an] association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke,” explained the study’s authors.
The IHME team found prior studies’ methodologies sloppy and inconsistent. As a result, they produced a statistical method that allowed them to compare evidence quantitatively “across different risk-outcome pairs.”
Put another way, using the developed function, researchers were able to generate a rating scale from one to five stars based on the quality of the previously published studies that claimed red meat had purported health risks.
Out of all the past research linking red meat consumption to poorer health outcomes, no studies garnered a rating higher than two out of five stars, according to the IHME researchers.
Dr. Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist and president of the New England Skeptical Society, commented that “the evidence for a direct vascular or health risk from eating meat regularly is [so] low… that there is probably no risk.” The danger, Novella suspects, is not that eating meat is dangerous; it’s that eating too few vegetables lowers protection from disease.