Red Meat Risk

By Quinn Phillips Red meat has been getting a bad rap for years, as studies have shown that it (along with its even more infamous cousin, processed meat) increases the risk of death from ailments such as cancer and heart disease. Two years ago, a large meta-analysis (using the combined data from many different studies) found that eating red meat, and processed meat in particular, was associated with a higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. This was true even after controlling for the generally less healthy lifestyle of frequent red meat eaters; age, weight, physical activity, smoking status, and family history of diabetes were all taken into account. But like all studies that simply look at data over time rather than measuring the effects of an intervention, this one couldn't prove that red meat was the reason for the observed higher rate of diabetes. A new study, though, comes closer to proving the link between red meat and diabetes. While still not up to the "gold standard" of a randomized controlled trial, this study looked at the effects of changes in red-meat-eating habits, rather than simply comparing people who ate more red meat with others who ate less. Published online by JAMA Internal Medicine, the study followed over 149,000 adults, most of them women, for up to 20 years, with questionnaires on participants' diets conducted every four years. According to a Bloomberg article on the study, researchers found that participants who increased their intake of red meat...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs