Health Man Blog

I’m sure you’ve seen it by now, in dozens of places. There’s a new study out there saying meat (especially red meat) is gonna kill you. I’ve stopped responding to these kinds of reports directly now that I’ve got a great source who just nails it every time. Once again, kudos to Dr. Michael Eades – he of Protein Power fame (he might have a thought or two about meat)

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/fast-food/meat-and-mortality/

Just a few tidbits to get you going:

The study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (free full text here) is a typical epidemiological or observational study.  The reports have it tarted up with a lot of fancy clothes, but it is really nothing but an observational study.  And, as we’ve gone over ad nauseum in these pages, observational studies can’t be used to prove causation.

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What I found more interesting than this study (which isn’t interesting or important at all) was the press coverage of it.  And I found especially interesting that which the press didn’t report.

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At the same time that this paper appeared, showing increased red meat consumption to be tied to a slight increased risk of death (and showing that those subjects eating white meat had less risk), a couple of other papers came out in the online pre-publication section of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN), arguably the world’s most prestigious nutritional scientific journal.  These two AJCN papers saw the light of day at around the same time as this highly-publicized study on meat and mortality, but demonstrated the opposite results.  They got no press coverage whatsoever.  Which proves what I’ve been saying all along: the press is biased against meat in general, and especially against red meat.  Knowing this, careful readers should take anything negative thing the media reports about red meat with an enormous grain of salt.

The whole post is well worth at read.