Hi, all my family members say that meat is unhealthy even though they all eat meat (some of them everyday). I myself only eat meat 1-2 maybe even 3 times a week and only very rarely red meat/non-lean meat. But the question is: Is meat really unhealthy?
Meat is not unhealthy. What’s unhealthy is processing, hormones, terrible living conditions of animals living in filth, and humans messing stuff up, just like every other food.
Carbs are not unhealthy
Fats are not unhealthy
Meat is not unhealthy
In its natural form.
A general rule is the more humans mess with something the worse it is.
    The most important thing to understand here is that there is absolutely 100% no blanket yes or no answer. It varies entirely based on what kind of meat we’re talking about, what cut, and how it’s prepared.
    Chicken is a great example. You can get processed, deep-fried dark-meat chicken with transfatty acids and all sorts of things and it will just be absolutely horrible for your health. Like smoking-level bad.
    You can also get natural, unprocessed grilled chicken breast, and it’s arguable the second best source of protein you can get, right behind of egg whites.
    It’s one those things like carbs or fat. Anything that just broadly lays down “that’s all bad” or “that’s all good” is going to be misleading at best.
I’ve pointed this out before:
There’s no such thing as a new diet.
Pretty much every one is a repeat. People have been on various diets due to geography, culture, religion, genetics for a millennium.
There’s no place where people are substantially healthier with some kind of link to diet.
There are entire cultures who don’t eat meat, or only eat seafood, or don’t eat wheat. Never consume dairy, etc etc etc.
None of them are shown to live substantially longer. There’s no tribe of 120 year old people in some rainforest.
Moderation seems to be the key between healthy and unhealthy. Beyond that it’s all bullshit and marketing.
Enjoy an occasional steak. Don’t do it 3X a week. Throw a vegetable next to it. Vary your vegetables and proteins. Have a big scoop of ice cream now and then. Also enjoy some fruit.
No, but it depends on the framing of your question. Is eating meat in the standard American diet unhealthy? Yes. Because it’s usually a fatty piece of meat or processed or fried meat in between processed buns and eaten with other processed foods. When we look at cultures like the Mormons who promote working out on top of eating whole farm to table foods including meats, eggs, vegetables, fruits, etc they live well into their 80s. There was a recent report that colon cancer is killing people as young as 35 now. We’ve connected colorectal cancer with red meat the last 15 years. The consumption of red meat is down but colorectal cases are skyrocketing. It’s obvious our disease problems are not meat, but something beyond that.
The “unhealthy” label is based on thresholds, saturated fat intake, cholesterol, etc. I don’t think your consumption would raise your risk for any chronic disease provided that you are in good health.
Some meats/cuts are very rich in vitamins/minerals and could be labeled as healthy/nutritious.
Happy to provide some clinical sources if you want to read further.
Im vegan, and I’ll be the first to admit meat that isn’t processed, cured, fried, burnt to a crisp (cooked over flame), and the animal isn’t fed any hormones, antibiotics, or food that is unnatural to them, can be part of a healthy diet.
You will have people that say meat is healthy, which I’m not saying it isn’t, and quote some paper or government agency, however, the reality is that most people eat meat every single meal and say “look aha this paper says meat is fine so I eat a cheeseburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
The American Heart Association and Harvard Medical School, for example, have plenty of recommendations for what you should eat and every one of them encourages moderation of red meat (beef and pork) and completely avoiding processed meats.
Your average redditor and headline reader sees “Studies show meat is healthy” and just completely ignores the nuance of what any of these reputable experts have to say. And so your average individual, at least of people I know, eat the entire quantity of meat recommended by the AHA in a day or two.
Red meat has been associated with an increase in heart disease and cancer in several studies. But correlation is not causation, and there are numerous reasons to be skeptical of the research on this topic. Countless studies have found that people who eat more red meat have a higher BMI; are more likely to be overweight/obese, smoke cigarettes, and be physically inactive; and are less likely to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and have higher than a high-school education. All of these variables are associated with a higher risk of heart disease and cancer, so it’s not possible to isolate red meat as the cause. Many recent studies have cast doubt on the theory that consuming red meat contributes to disease. Red meat (especially grass-fed) is rich in several bioavailable nutrients—like B12, zinc, iron, CLA, and EPA and DHA—that Americans and people around the world are commonly deficient in.
Meat is probably fine. Some cohort studies, especially those that lump red and processed meat together, and especially those in the US, find it to correlate with bad outcomes. That seems like fairly weak evidence from which to infer a harmful effect.
Aaaahhhhhh lol. It’s crazy people are thinking meat is the bad guy. Literally been eating for how long as a race? Meat is very healthy for you. You can make an argument for either side depending on what stats you want to reference. But just think logically about history and human evolution. We are omnivores. To me, vegan/vegetarian is a simple attempt at a complex problem and it doesn’t “solve” it
No! It’s not. We are omnivores. Too much red meat can be bad but not enough can also be bad. Red meat contains heme-iron which is a very bioavailable form of iron that you can’t get from any plant sources. Chicken contains an amino acid called leucine in high amounts, leucine is the limiting factor in most cases for muscle protein synthesis.
Meat is not bad it’s just been bastardized. Too much meat can be bad though but it also depends on what the rest of the diet looks like and how much fiber you’re getting. There’s not really any “bad” unprocessed, Whole Foods, but there are bad diets and quantities.
We evolved hunting and gathering. Before agriculture, the only way to get enough food energy to thrive was through eating animals. Our physiology is adapted for this (e.g. very acidic stomach, short colon).
Quality matters. Too much processed meat (or processed anything really) is likely to degrade your health. Some people eat purely red meat and thrive. Some people eat processed vegan / keto food and their health deteriorates. We don’t have good studies on actual cause and effect because these studies are too expensive and problematic (you need to control all variables of the subjects diet and lifestyle, and no humans are willing to live their entire lives in labs for this). All we have is epidemiology, which is basically surveying people and trying to find links between things (e.g. red meat and cancer).
Compared to what?
“ After multivariate adjustment for major lifestyle and dietary risk factors, the pooled hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval of total mortality was 1.13 (1.07-1.20) for 1-serving per day increase of unprocessed red meat, 1.20 (1.15-1.24) for processed red meat. The corresponding HRs were 1.18 (1.13-1.23) and 1.21 (1.13-1.31) for CVD mortality, 1.10 (1.06-1.14) and 1.16 (1.09-1.23) for cancer mortality. We estimated that substitutions of 1-serving per day of other foods (including fish, poultry, nuts, legumes, low-fat dairy, and whole grains) for 1-serving per day of red meat were associated with a 7%-19% lower mortality risk. We also estimated that 9.3% of deaths in men and 7.6% in women in our cohorts could be prevented at the end of follow-up if all individuals consumed <0.5 serving/d (≈42 g/d) of red meat.
Conclusions
Red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, CVD and cancer mortality. Substitution of other healthy protein sources for red meat is associated with a lower mortality risk.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712342/
Unprocessed, low Satrated fat meats like chicken breast are extremely healthy as they are high in vitamin b12, all essential amino acids as well as potassium and other minerals. Other animal products like fish and eggs are also incredibly healthy for you.The animal products to worry about are ones high in saturated fat like butter or highly processed like some forms of deli meat as these can contain harmful preservatives and a lot of sodium
The true answer to this is “it depends how mamy carbohydrates are being consumed alongside” sources;
History of all meat dietshttps://www.diagnosisdiet.com/full-article/all-meat-diets
link between prediabetes and heart disease https://cardiab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12933-021-01302-w
low carbohydrates and Neurodegenerative Diseases https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7699472/
low carbohydrates and epilepsy https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28799513/
low carbohydrates and diabetes https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16318637/
It’s important to note that your health is way more than what your diet consists of (and way way way more than a single food in your overall diet). Water will kill you faster than meat will, if dosed appropriately.
Unless you have a health condition that requires you to stay away from specific foods (i.e. Celiac disease), it really isn’t worthwhile to attempt to vilify a single food.
I eat meat every single day, without fail, and I am far and away healthier than most of my cohort (30M). I also sleep eight hours a day, do intense exercise 3-4 times a week, watch my portions, eat fruits and veggies, etc, so there’s more to it than just “meat good meat bad”
Watch this documentary - you make your own mind up about it - Forks Over Knives.
This channel has every single aspect of meat-eating in it - check it also out - https://www.youtube.com/@informationarchive
As someone who ate meat for over 20 years and became vegetarian only this year as a new year’s resolution, all I can say is I’m glad I don’t eat meat anymore.
My body feels lighter, my mind feels clearer, my endurance is higher and much much more.
I’m not an expert in food, I just know that for me, personally, I’ve been happy not eating meat. HOWEVER, I’m not saying meat is unhealthy. Years ago I did keto and survived off of fatty meat and had great results!
I guess what this random internet stranger is trying to say is who cares if you eat meat or don’t. Do YOU feel healthy?
Its not unhealthy, processed meat is, with hormones and conservatives. Just like most of all other food. Every once in a while, someone finds a study made god knows where, with questionable circumstances, they make conclusions about those studies and propagate how good/bad x food is without proper study about it.
Meat is probably the healthiest thing you can eat. For hundreds of thousands of years that was the only reliable source of food on the planet. Native Americans and other tribes lived their lives according to the migration of Buffalo etc. None of them (I assume) were overweight or suffered from modern diseases.
Processed food is bad for you. A lot of vegan food are some of the most processed food you can find. Vegetable and seed oils are poison and was used as machine lubricant until lobbyists found a way to sell it as “safe for human consumption”.
A good rule of thumb is this: anything that was consumed (food wise) before 1900 is safe, meats, vegetables etc. Things like sugar should be consumed in limit quantities. The majority of food on supermarket shelves are garbage and made with crap that is bad for you.
The media is trying to push that meat is unhealthy because they want men to be weak and feminine And without meat you can’t build muscle that well and testostrone meat is fine as long as you limit it count your calories and get your proper protein amounts don’t go over it can be toxic.