Yet another “study” condemns red meat
Red meat has been a favorite target for splashy news headlines for years. I’ve lost track of all the “red meat will kill you” stories I’ve heard – and that’s just since the 1980s. And if you were reading the newspapers, the Internet, or watching the news any time in the last few weeks, you undoubtedly heard about the new study “proving” that eating red meat every day ups your chances of an early grave by as much as 30 percent.
But if that story made you toss out all the beef in your house and swear off burgers, let me give you a little pep talk that could get you back to the butcher store.
The new study was big news because it claims to be the first red meat health study that was on a large scale (more than 500,000 were surveyed), over a long period of time (10 years), and factored in the overall health of those surveyed.
On the surface, it seems that this study is different than all the other pot shot studies that have accused red meat of every health evil in the book. But is this new study really that different?
The leader of the study, Rashmi Sinha of the National Cancer Institute, says, “The bottom line is we found an association between red and processed meat and an increased risk of mortality.”
Barry Popkin, a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina, went even farther, saying “It’s a slam dunk to say that, ‘Yes, indeed, if people want to be healthy and life longer, consume less red and processed meat.’”
Hmmm … now if you’re like me, you’re wondering exactly what expertise a professor of “global nutrition” (whatever that is) has when it comes to the medical links between red meat and ill-health. And that’s when this supposedly earth-shaking study starts to fail the smell test a bit.
I decided to do some digging, and you’ll never believe the dirt I came up with.
Turns out the entire large-scale, “slam dunk study” was based on a food frequency questionnaire sent out by AARP – back in 1995! It gets worse: the participants were required to remember how often they ate over 124 different foods over the course of an entire year!
Could it be that those who ate red meat ate more of everything? And maybe those who ate more of everything were also more likely to eat sugar-laden junk food and sodas or juice drinks that could contribute to other health problems that increase your risk of death?
Maybe they were drinking fluoridated water, or dumping sugar substitutes in their coffee. Who knows?
I’m sure if these “master statisticians” looked hard enough, they could statistically “prove” that people who preferred licorice jelly beans or brown M&Ms also had higher scores on their SATs. It’s outlandish – and so is this study.
The fact that more than 3,000 news sources could print it as the gospel truth has to make you question every single “breakthrough study” or “scientific research” you hear about in the mainstream media.
Unfortunately, I’m just scratching the surface of the disturbing truth behind this bogus study. Fact is, it’s so full of horse manure, you can smell it a mile away. I’ll expose all the dirty details in an upcoming issue of The Douglass Report.
