Red Meat is Bad for You

Yesterday I got this pretty good rant early in the morning.  Then I went to Best Buy and you can read about the rest in yesterday's post.  So this pretty good one had to do with a report that eating red meat was bad for you. Nothing new there, we have known that for years.  The new part of it has to do with the fact that it can reduce your lifespan significantly.



Now I'm not going to make any claim to be a doctor and know a lot about cholesterol but I have been forced to watch the amount that I intake for going on 20 years now.  Their statement was that if you eat more than 3 portions per week it can reduce your life by several years.  You have to keep in mind that one portion is 4oz of raw meat.  Next time you decide you are going to have steak, put it on a scale.  I bet you will find that if you eat the whole thing you are getting 2.5 servings, which means you should stop eating red meat for the week.


I have a couple of problems with this.  The first is the significant reduction in lifespan.  The average person lives to be something like 74.  The number they were using was 2 years.  Again, I'm not going to make a claim to be a mathematician (though I did take my fair share of math to earn my computer science degree) and my math shows that as roughly 3%.  That doesn't seem too significant to me.  Now if they said 7 years, I would have to agree that it was significant.


The next problem I have is that they can't actually prove that eating red meat was what caused someone to pass when they did.  And even if they could, when did they start tracking what they ate?  To give this any credit, they would need to track everything the individuals in the study ate from birth to death.  Which leads to the next flaw in the study (next paragraph).  Think of it like this, let's say someone lives to be 74 and averages 2.5 meals per day (accounting for fasting for medical reasons and fewer meals on holidays, stuff like that).  That is 67,525 meals per person.  In those meals you would need to take into account everything (think of a salad).  You would also need to know the quantity of each item to match.  That would mean a simple salad of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, peppers, croutons, and dressing just created 7 entries!


The next flaw is that in order to track this information it would have to be a huge database.  One of the problems that I have with these medical studies is the size of the study.  They are generally based on a rather small group of people.  How does a sample size of 10,000 people (which would be a huge study) really represent the whole population of the world?  That is far less than 1% of the world population!  But imagine if we were looking at 10,000 people that met the averages above.  That would mean tracking 675,250,000 meals!  Take into consideration that the average complexity of each item is something like 4 items (keep in mind a spice would need to be tracked also), you would have 2,701,000,000 records.  Some of you may not know much about database size but let me tell you, that would be one huge database!



And what makes this worse is that they are attacking red meat alone.  I understand that red meat is higher in fat but you can get lean cuts that are actually very low in fat, or even substitute bison for beef.  But if you think you are saving something by eating that turkey burger, take a closer look.  They generally have as much fat and cholesterol as a beef burger.  And how about the turkey bacon?  I looked, it has less fat and less cholesterol but it is for one slice while the pork bacon is for two!  The only way that these turkey or chicken is if they are made with breast meat only.  Unfortunately, it isn't cheap to do that so they are generally made with a combination of the meats along with the skin.  So the only way to really have one that is truly lower in fat is to make it yourself.  And that won't help in the cholesterol side of things!


But the real problem that there is covers more than just the fat and cholesterol, it includes the sodium.  We are in a society where we don't have time to cook the way they did even 30 years ago.  We often purchase something that is frozen or, my favorite phrase, pumped with a solution.  These items, though convenient, aren't usually the best products in taste or quality but they are usually the best that we can do because we don't have time to do what we need to.  Restaurants are more of the problem because they want to provide you with two simple feelings: the food tastes really good; and you got a good meal for the price.  Their whole point is to get you to return.  They don't really care about your health.