IS RED MEAT BAD FOR YOU?
Health professionals and popular literature teach that red meat and saturated fat are bad for you. But current scientific research tells a different story.
“The science is now quite clear that there's no reason to avoid red meat and in fact it's such nourishing food and especially when you're younger or older, you really need a lot of nourishment, and it's kind of foolish to avoid red meat.”
--Nicolette Hahn Niman
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From a conversation with Nicolette Hahn Niman, environmental activist and author of “Defending Beef”. For the entire conversation, please click on the link to the YouTube video.
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HART: You call into question the dietary orthodoxy that says red meat is bad for you. So let me ask you, is red meat bad for you?
NICOLETTE: I did a lot of research. I had been talking to people about this for ages and I've read lots of mainstream media articles about it. It was apparent that there's been a serious re-examination of a lot of the work that originally began this thinking that red meat was bad for you.
In the process of doing the research for “Defending Beef”, I delved much more deeply into it than I had ever done before. At that point I realized that at this point in time there's not a consensus that red meat is bad for you. In fact, it's kind of reversed.
HART: I think there's a difference between science itself and the orthodoxy that has cropped up in the popular media and the health field.
NICOLETTE: I was a science major in college, and both of my sisters are medical doctors. My father was a specialist in the history of medicine. So I've been interested in medicine and its practice for a long time. I respect scientific research and this idea that we keep trying to learn more and gain more knowledge.
But one of the things that I've realized is that when you have an idea that becomes really entrenched and becomes really widespread, it's very difficult to change course on that because people begin to accept it as an axiom.
I had a conversation with a nutrition professor who is in her 60s. She had been teaching students for decades that fat is bad for you and in particular saturated fat, animal fat is the worst thing. She had heard a speech that I gave and came up and talked to me afterwards. She was really challenging me on this.
I realized in the course of that conversation that it was very hard for her to accept the idea that this wasn't correct--she had been teaching this for decades. All of a sudden she had to acknowledge that she had sent hundreds, maybe thousands, of students off, not just with misperceptions, but out to practice in the real world teaching their patients the wrong thing.
It's a really big thing to undo your beliefs if you're a medical practitioner or a dietician. I've realized that undoing the science is hard. But it’s now quite clear that saturated fat is not bad for you and especially if it's not oxidized. That's what my book goes through in some detail.
There's now a much more sophisticated understanding. The idea that fat from animals is bad for you is just basically wrong. But you can do things to all different kinds of food, including the fat from animals that will make them bad for you.
A lot of meat is highly processed food that has a lot of additives of all different kinds of chemicals and preservatives.
I found that the health studies about meat are almost universally studies that just clump every type of meat together. But the few studies that have broken down what type of meat we’re talking about, they make a distinction between processed meat and unprocessed meat.
It’s even better if they make a distinction between grass-fed and organic and other labels like that. Almost no studies do that. But if you at least eliminate processed meat then suddenly there is no correlation between any negative health effects.
There's a really big study that was done by Harvard School of Public Health, which is ironic because the overall message from the Harvard School of Public Health still is fairly anti-meat. But some of their own work has shown that this blanket condemnation of meat is just absolutely unscientific, and is false.
So what happened in my research is, I realized the science no longer supports a condemnation of meat. But people that are practicing in the field of diet, nutrition and medicine have accepted this because it's an idea that's been out there for so long.
The science is now quite clear that there's no reason to avoid red meat and in fact it's such nourishing food and especially when you're younger or older, you really need a lot of nourishment, and it's kind of foolish to avoid red meat.
HART: An example that you’ve talked about is that maybe thirty percent of pregnant women are iron deficient, and beef has higher quality iron that your body can absorb more readily than other sources of iron.
NICOLETTE: Yeah. In fact, it's ironic because sometimes you'll get into discussions with people who are vegetarians. And people will look at India and say they have almost a whole nation of vegetarians. Well, first of all, I learned through my own research and discussions with people who are experts in India that only about thirty to forty percent of the population of India is vegetarian. Also, there's been a significant body of research showing that anemia is a very big problem in India. In fact, the rates of anemia among pregnant women and nursing mothers in India are alarmingly high.
So India is a place where you have a lot of vegetarianism and you're seeing negative health impacts as a result of that. So there's a great deal of discussion about these issues now and I'm glad of that. But the science is really actually quite clear. Meat, in and of itself, meat per se--not the meat products, the food products that we eat that may contain meat.
For example, 34 percent of the calories in the United States are from fast-food. So, if you think about that for a minute, that a lot of the meat that people are eating are probably fast food hamburgers and chicken nuggets and things like that. Those foods are going to have a lot of issues from the sourcing and in the preparation.