Red Meat is Safe! Well, Maybe​
Amidst all the bad news we face almost daily were reports of a new study that gave men and women, at least the carnivore types, a reason to keep on living. The headlines were all variations of the following:

    “New Study Finds Red Meat is Healthy, No Real Risks.”

Throughout the land, joyous meat-eating men and women put on their ketchup-concealing dark jeans and red gingham dresses and headed to the Outback Steakhouse, but was the impulse correct? Should they/we all be ordering the 20-ounce T-Bones or Teriyaki Filet Medallions, maybe starting with a Bloomin’ Onion, with dietary impunity?

What Exactly Did This New Study Say?​
Researchers at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) have permanently arched eyebrows, like Trekkies doing some Spock cosplay at a Star Trek Convention. That’s because the IHME, like Spock, is inherently skeptical, in this case, skeptical of studies that try to find an observational link between some action – like eating pickled eggs or something – and cancer, some other disease, or plain old death.

In response to these sometimes-shoddy studies, the IHME uses a novel statistical method known as “burden of proof risk function” to quantitatively “evaluate and summarize evidence of risk across different risk-outcome pairs.” This allows them to scan all the data for a particular health risk and derive a number that translates to a 1-5 star rating system.

In this instance, they looked at all relevant studies pertaining to red meat and its association with six outcomes: breast cancer, colorectal cancer, type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease (coronary heart disease or hardening of the arteries), ischemic stroke (when a blood vessel to the brain gets blocked), and hemorrhagic stroke (a brain bleed).

Their analysis brought them to the conclusion that unprocessed red meat (cuts of beef, pork, veal, horse, and sheep, as opposed to the stuff you find on a pizza) was weakly associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer, breast cancer, ischemic heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes by at least 6%, 3%, 1%, and 1%, respectively. Each of these pairs received two stars in their rating system.

As far as unprocessed red meat and ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, they found no association, earning them each one star.

They concluded the following, all of which spits in the face of conventional health wisdom:

    “The available evidence suggests that elevated unprocessed red meat has a weak association with the risk of colorectal cancer, breast cancer, ischemic heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. It may affect ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, but there is currently insufficient evidence to draw this conclusion.”

As Spock would say, “Logical. Flawlessly logical.”