Red meat boosts risk of dying young: study

 

WASHINGTON: Eating a portion of processed red meat daily can boost a person's risk of dying young by up to 20 per cent, said a long-running US study of more than 120,000 people released on Monday.

While the research by Harvard University experts offers more evidence that eating red meat increases the risk of heart disease and cancer, it also counsels that substituting fish and poultry may lower early death risk.

"This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death," said Frank Hu, senior author of the study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers gleaned their data from a study of 37,698 men who were followed for 22 years and 83,644 women who were tracked for 28 years.

Subjects answered surveys about their eating habits every four years.

Those who ate a card-deck-sized serving of unprocessed red meat each day on average saw a 13 per cent higher risk of dying than those who did not eat red meat as frequently.

And if the red meat was processed, like in a hot dog or two slices of bacon, that risk jumped to 20 per cent.

However, substituting nuts for red meat lowered total mortality risk by 19 per cent, while poultry or whole grains lowered the risk 14 per cent and fish did so by seven per cent.

The authors said between seven and nine per cent of all deaths in the study "could be prevented if all the participants consumed fewer than 0.5 servings per day of total red meat."

Processed red meat has been shown to contain ingredients such as saturated fat, sodium, nitrites and some carcinogens that are linked to many chronic ailments including heart disease and cancer.

"More than 75 per cent of the $2.6 trillion in annual US health care costs are from chronic disease," said an accompanying commentary by Dean Ornish, a physician and dietary expert at the University of California, San Francisco.

"Eating less red meat is likely to reduce morbidity from these illnesses, thereby reducing health care costs."

A separate study, also led by Hu but published in Circulation, an American Heart Association journal, found that men who drank sugar-sweetened beverages daily faced a 20 per cent higher risk of heart disease than men who did not.

The study tracked more than 42,000 men, most of them Caucasian, over 22 years and found higher heart risks, as higher levels of inflammation and harmful lipids known as triglycerides in daily sweet-drinkers.

The effects were not seen in men who drank as many as two sugar-sweetened beverages per week.

According to Hu, the research "provides strong justification for reducing sugary beverage consumption among patients, and more importantly, in the general population."

Heart disease is the biggest killer in the United States and top risk factors include obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, diabetes and poor eating habits.

-AFP/ac


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Study: Too much red meat may shorten lifespan

By Anne Harding, Health.com

In addition, a diet rich in red meat is likely to come up short in other areas, says Robert Ostfeld, M.D. 

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• A new study is the first to estimate the effect of red meat on a person's lifespan
• Each additional daily serving was associated with a 20% higher risk of dying
• Charring red meat at high temperatures can produce carcinogens on the surface 
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• (Health.com) -- Want to live longer? Trade some of the red meat in your diet for fish, nuts, whole grains, and other healthier protein sources, Harvard researchers say.
• 
  That's the conclusion of a new study, published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, that found that the risk of dying at an early age -- from heart disease, cancer, or any other cause—rises in step with red-meat consumption.
  
  Eating too much red meat, which is high in saturated fat and cholesterol, has long been seen as unhealthy, especially for the heart. The new study, however, is the first to estimate the effect of swapping out red meat on a person's lifespan.

Health.com: The 10 best foods for your heart 

Using data from two long-running studies of health professionals, researchers tracked the diets of more than 121,000 middle-aged men and women for up to 28 years. Roughly 20% of the participants died during that period. 

On average, each additional serving of red meat the participants ate per day was associated with a 13% higher risk of dying during the study. Processed red meat products -- such as hot dogs, bacon, and salami -- appeared to be even more dangerous: Each additional daily serving was associated with a 20% higher risk of dying.

Based on these findings, the researchers estimate that substituting one daily serving of red meat with fish, poultry, nuts, legumes, whole grains, or low-fat dairy products would reduce the risk of dying in this stage of life by 7% to 19%. If everyone in the study had slashed their average red-meat intake to less than half a serving per day, the researchers say, 9% of deaths among men and 8% of deaths among women could have been prevented.

Health.com: Easy food swaps that cut cholesterol, not taste 

"Our message is to try to reduce the red meat consumption to less than two to three servings per week," says lead author An Pan, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston.

"We don't want everyone to be a vegetarian," Pan says, though he adds that avoiding processed red meat altogether may be a good idea. "It's better to go with unprocessed products and plant-based foods."

Dean Ornish, M.D., the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, in Sausalito, California, says a plant-based diet provides a "double benefit" in that it reduces a person's exposure to the harmful substances in meat while also providing valuable nutrients.

"There are literally hundreds of thousands of protective substances that you find in fruits and vegetables and whole grains and legumes and soy products that prevent disease," says Ornish, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study.

Health.com: America's healthiest superfoods for women

Why is red meat, and especially processed red meat, potentially harmful? In addition to the high saturated fat content, which can contribute to heart disease, charring red meat at high temperatures can produce carcinogens on the surface, Pan says. And processed meats contain certain additives that in high quantities are believed to promote cancer as well.

In addition, a diet rich in red meat is likely to come up short in other areas, says Robert Ostfeld, M.D., a cardiologist and associate professor of clinical medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx, N.Y.

"If you eat more red meat, on average, you may be eating fewer fruits and vegetables, so you're getting the bad things from the red meat and you're not getting the good things from the fruits and vegetables," says Ostfeld, who did not participate in the study. "My preference is for people to have as little red meat as they can, and I think it's ideal to avoid red meat."

Staffan Lindeberg, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at the University of Lund, in Sweden, says singling out red meat may be counterproductive. A bigger threat to health is the sugar- and starch-heavy Western diet as a whole, says Lund, who studies heart disease and diabetes and advocates a version of the so-called Paleolithic diet, which emphasizes lean meats, fruits, and vegetables.

"We need to focus more on common foods, like grains, dairy foods, refined fats, and refined sugar," Lindeberg says.

Studies like Pan's are inherently iffy due to red meat's unhealthy reputation, which makes red-meat consumption difficult to tease apart from a person's overall lifestyle, Lindeberg says. "Red meat has been perceived as a villain for many years, and people who avoid red meat take all sorts of precautionary measures for their future health," he says. "It is not possible to statistically adjust for all of these measures."

Sure enough, Pan and his colleagues found that the men and women in the study who ate the most red meat also tended to be heavier, less physically active, and more likely to smoke and drink alcohol than their peers. However, the researchers did take those and other factors into account in their analysis.
Dangers of eating red meat

Is eating red meat bad for health?

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/12/health/red-meat-shorten-lifespan/index.html?iref=obinsite