Should You Stop Eating Red Meat? A New Paper Has a Controversial Answer

Conclusions were based on five different reviews of prior research on red and processed meat consumption, touching on both health outcomes and cultural preferences. To assess those studies, the team used a research approach that rates the certainty of existing evidence, giving more weight to things like randomized controlled trials—in which one study group carries out a certain behavior, while another acts as a control group—and less weight to observational studies, which use patterns in a dataset to find associations between a behavior and an outcome. The panel also focused on the “absolute risk” associated with eating meat, rather than changes in “relative risk,” which Johnston says can sometimes distort the magnitude of an effect. “If the baseline risk in the population of an illness is 2% and after a study it’s shown to reduce to 1%, that’s a 50% relative risk reduction, but it’s actually only a 1% absolute risk reduction,” he explains. Using that framework, the group found “only low-certainty evidence of a very small reduction in cancer or other adverse health consequences from reducing meat consumption [by three servings per week,]” Johnston says. “For most people who enjoy eating meat, the uncertain health benefits of cutting down are unlikely to be worth it.” (The authors did not consider non-health-related reasons for cutting back on meat, such as ethical or environmental concer...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Diet/Nutrition embargoed study Source Type: news