Should You Eat Red Meat? And How Much? — Great Debates

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Welcome to the Great Debates, where we consider the greatest nutritional controversies of our time. Our goal isn’t to tell you what to think or do, but rather to present both sides of hot-button issues, like coffee (is it good for you?) and breakfast (the most important meal of the day?). What’s being said? Who’s saying it? Then it’s up to you to make your own decisions.

If you are looking for evidence that red meat is killing you, there is no shortage of cautionary headlines. Here’s a brief, incomplete sampling: “Red Alert on Red Meat” (Time, 2001); “Dying for Some Red Meat? You May Be” (Washington Post, 2009); “Red Meat Linked to Cancer and Heart Disease” (New York Times, 2012); “Meat Is Linked to Higher Cancer Risk, W.H.O. Report Finds” (New York Times, 2015); “Eating too much red meat ‘can age the body’, researchers claim” (The Guardian, 2016); Red Meat Tied to Diverticulitis Risk (New York Times, 2017).

We could do this all day!

And yet there is a wrinkle, which is that plenty of other studies suggest red meat not only won’t kill you, but may in fact even be good for you. A 2012 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that eating lean beef might actually reduce the risk of heart disease. Multiple studies have shown meaty, Atkins-like diets to be particularly effective for weight loss. And then there are the various health benefits of saturated animal fats.

There is enough conflicting (and muddled, and often flawed) evidence to leave a person very confused, and also hungry. Should we foreswear our organic, grass-fed hamburgers? Should we eat more hamburgers? Are we eating just the right number of hamburgers? Does it even matter at all?

In the interest of both taste and longevity, let us examine the evidence.

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Filed under: Fitness