Anytime I try to get an answer to this question I can’t seem to find the answer I’m looking for. Most studies that link meat consumption to negative health outcomes test a typical western diet which includes meat, against a vegetarian or vegan diet consumer. In these studies it seems that the health effects would come less from the absence of meat but more from the inclusion of vegetables. I find that makes these types of studies very unbalanced. Are there any studies which give a more balanced approach than this? Perhaps comparing two meat eating diets but one with more vegetables/ fruits?
You say “test” which implies an active intervention, but I think you are actually looking at epidemiological studies that are comparing groups/clusters of similar people to other groups/clusters and it’s just looking at what people actually eat and the outcomes they experience vs forcing groups to eat a certain way.
I asked a similar question in grad school about the lack of study on high meat+high F&V groups and the two explanations I got (from top nutrition epi researchers) was that 1) there aren’t actually that many Americans who eat that way. High meat tends to correlate with the rest of the diet being unhealthy as well. And 2) if you do pick a sample that includes enough people who eat this way, you find that too many people who do high meat+high F&V are also pursuing extreme amounts of exercise so you can’t adequately separate the dietary and exercise contributions to their outcomes (you’d need people with that diet at all exercise levels to be able to control for exercise).
Yep. Pretty much how it is. Much of the science is slightly biased and very flawed.
Bottom line, even when you see studies linking meat consumption to things like CVD and cancer, much of the time its processed meats. Which no duh are bad for you.
There is no evidence that suggests eating unprocessed meats in a healthy well balanced whole foods diet is bad for you.
I know it’s kind of a weird way to think about it, but there is an opportunity cost to food, yeah? Every time you’re eating salami you’re taking up space in your diet (total calories, stomach capacity, whatever) that could otherwise be filled with black beans. So I’m not really sure you can totally control for this.
I’m not really all that good on interpreting data but I think the Adventist health studies are probably useful here because they divided up people into vegan, vegetarian, semi-vegetarian, pescatarian, and non-vegetarian categories. I think this is probably good data to look at here because this is studying a generally healthy population (by some accounts the healthiest in the world) and they chunked it up by different patterns of animal food consumption. I’m not sure whether or not they asked people what they were eating instead of animal foods (or I don’t see it in the study here), but I think it’s probably safe to assume that semi-vegetarians are still eating more vegetables than the general population. They still found what I would call pretty significant differences between people in all of these categories.
My understanding is that the studies that control for dietary, lifestyle, and individual variables show that in moderation, there’s no negative health outcome for eating meat. The problem is that, as you pointed out, there are always confounding variables. It’s easy to take someone who subsists on McDonald’s, dies at 50, and say “look, meat was bad for that person!”
The real research shows the opposite.
There’s nothing wrong with eating meat. I eat red meat rarely because of the fact that for me to really enjoy cooking it I have to have an amazing crust on my steak or burger and that leads to charring which is proven to be carcinogenic. I have red meat maybe 4 times a month. Other than that I eat meat multiple times a day, but I also eat a shit ton of nuts, vegetables, complex carbs, etc. The demonization of meat is the culprit of how flawed nutritional science is. It follows correlation that leads to hypothesis rather than causation because you can’t prove causation through survey studies. I think people shouldn’t over eat meat and shouldn’t make it a primary center of your diet. But if you’re eating non GMO, organic meat that’s sustainably raised, working out, eating vegetables and fruit, complex carbs, supplementing, etc you’re doing your part to be healthy. Go do your health screenings, go do your blood marker tests, go do your imaging. That’s the best we can do to stay healthy.
This may or may not be what you’re looking for, but there are studies that test the dose response of different foods, i.e., that attempt to demonstrate whether increasing amounts of certain foods increases or decreases risks of certain diseases. Here’s a couple of metanalyses I found in a quick search:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28397016/ (showed significant decreased risk of Type 2 diabetes with increased consumption of whole grains, fruits and dairy, and a significant increased risk of Type 2 diabetes with increased consumption of red meat, processed meat, and sugary beverages).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29039970/ (showed a negative association between increased consumption of whole grains, veggies, fruits, nuts and fish and coronary heart disease, and a positive association between CHD and increased consumption of eggs, red meat, processed meat, and sugary beverages).