The Newest “Red Meat Will Kill You” Study

April 22, 2019

I'm not even going to bother dissecting the latest study purporting that red meat is not good for you.  It's based on bad science, just like all the rest of the studies I've seen, and Mark Sisson (one of my faves) does a great job dissecting it himself.  So here is HIS rebuttal to the latest study, which I agree with wholeheartedly.  The highlights are in bold:

Have you heard? There's a new "red meat will kill you" study. This time, it's colorectal cancer.

Here's the press release.

Here's the full study.

The biggest head scratcher:  red meat was actually protective in women.  Why didn't they highlight the fact that in women, eating red meat was associated with a lower risk?  That's half the world's population. That's your mom, your daughter, your grandmother, your girlfriend. And unless they were to look at the full study and read the fine print, they'd never know that red meat actually had the opposite relationship.  You'd think the authors would want to mention that in the abstract....

Does this mean that it's definitely giving men bowel cancer?  Absolutely not.

I don't need to go into all the confounding factors that might predispose conventional red meat lovers to bowel cancer.  Nor will I mention that it's impossible to fully control for variables like the buns and bread and fries you eat the red meat with and the industrial seed oils it's cooked in. 

And in the end, the increased risk was a relative risk.  It wasn't a 20% absolute increase in risk.  It was a relative increase in risk.  The subjects started with a 0.5% risk of getting bowel cancer.  In those who ate the most processed meat and red meat, that risk increased 20%—to 0.6%!

From 0.5 to 0.6%.  Sure, that's an increase, but is it something to overhaul your entire diet for?  To give up the best sources of zinc, iron, B vitamins, protein, carnosine, creatine?  All that for a measly 0.1% that hasn't even been established as causal?

Couldn't have said it better myself (so I didn't)!