That’s red meat in quotes because they didn’t test red meat—they tested red meat AND processed meat junk combined. Then tell us red meat is bad. Duh!
You’ll hear incessant bleatings that red meat is bad and we shouldn’t eat it; it leads to heart disease, strokes etc. This is all NONSENSE. You put poison with good food, feed it to people and say “don’t eat this, it hurts people.” That just condemns good food.
We NEED meat. It’s our ancestral food (Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man were big meat eaters). Red meat, such as beef, contains important food substances we need, such as carnitine and omega-3s. Yes, believe it or not, grass-fed beef is the richest source of omega-3s we have (this does not apply to grain-fed beef, of course, even though grains are technically grass).
This is where it gets stupid, because carnitine is used as a treatment for vascular disease. Several clinical trials show that L-carnitine and propionyl-L-carnitine can be used along with conventional treatment for angina to reduce medication needs and improve the ability of those with angina to exercise without chest pain.
“This study adds to a large and growing body of literature on the relationship between red meat and chronic disease,” study author Adam M. Bernstein, MD, research director of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, told Medscape Medical News.
No it doesn’t! Hello!… professor of nutrition here, are you listening to me?
All these silly studies show is that processed meats are toxic junk. Listen, you only have to watch it being made to know that. I once worked as the duty doctor for a sausage manufacturing company. There was stuff put in the sausages that would burn and blister the skin of workers, if they spilled it!
Where there is data incriminating red meat, they never address secondary issues, like maybe the food is fried. Or meats in the USA are commonly eaten with fries and rarely with vegetables. We know fried food is bad. Fried ANYTHING will shorten your life considerably. It so happens that meats get fried (or roasted, same thing). That doesn’t mean meat is bad.
I always fall back on quoting the Intuit (eskimo) diet. Their traditional food is over 90% fat meats and fish; no carbohydrates. Eskimos do NOT get strokes and heart disease—not until they adopt the modern diet and start eating burgers and fries.
Protein Substitutions
Although there was no significant association between increasing intakes of fish, dairy, or legumes and the risk for stroke, there was an association when some of these protein sources took the place of what they called red meat.
For example, by substituting 1 serving of red meat with a serving of nuts or fish, the stroke risk was reduced by 17%, and by replacing the red meat with low-fat dairy, the risk went down by 11%. Substituting 1 serving of red meat with a serving of poultry resulted in a 27% reduction in stroke risk.
When substituting these foods, it is possible to maintain energy balance by, for example, eating nuts or yogurt instead of bacon at breakfast, or yogurt or nuts in a salad instead of a hamburger at lunch or dinner, said the authors.
The message is clear: DON’T EAT MANUFACTURED MEATS!
[SOURCE: Stroke. Published online December 29, 2011. Abstract]
I remember reading Joel Salatin who sold his truly free free range chickens to restaurants. The cooks liked them so much better because their hands didn’t burn from chemicals after hours of cutting them up like they did with CAFO chickens.
But we really shouldn’t eat so much meat, especially grass-based meat. It displaces all those tax-subsidized grains that steal our wealth, bankrupt farmers and make the food manufacturers and chemical producers wealthy.
Very witty Joanne 🙂
Being in this business for over 30 years, I have found that a new basic concept has emerged. Is the food you are eating God-made, not food that is man-made or tampered by man? Man doesn’t change our food to make it healthier. Man changes our food to increase profits. And America is the worse ( when it comes to messing with our food) because profit is what makes America great. It just makes its citizens sick. But then again, there is profit in that too. Eat God-made foods that havent been tampered by man. Be it beef or corn, cows are not suppose to eat corn. They are suppose to eat grass.
These studies came from the same mentality that gave us many conventional maxims. They include the notion that refined grains were the staff of life, that eggs caused heart attacks, that drugs led to the highest form of health, and that medical doctors were the best source of information to maximize one’s quality of life.
I have been a red meat eater all my life and at 63 I still have very low blood pressure and so far so good on other fronts. I’m confused about your comment:
“It so happens that meats get fried (or roasted, same thing).”
If roasting (even the slow cooking kind of roasting?) is the same as frying then what IS the best way to prepare red meat so it isn’t ‘bad’ for you? How can one enjoy a medium rare steak without some kind of heavy searing or browning on the outside? When you say FRYING do you mean cooking in very hot oil or grease? (That is what I understand the process of ‘frying’ means and ‘roasting’ is cooking in an oven, slow or fast heat… ) Would you please clarify? I think our definitions may be different hence the confusion…
Thanks
A number of years ago it was pouring down in Middlesbrough England so I jumped into Watersons’s the book shop. I got a bit nosey around a book called Eat right For Your type by Peter Dadamo. My Blood group is A Negative, only 7% of the British population are A- or so my donor card says.
Dadamo told me my foods likes and dislikes, he was bang on. he told me why I suffered heartburn, again, bang on. I have looked at food differently ever since and try as best to stick to my food type……It works…It does.
Dadamo tells me as i’m A- I should really be veggie but if I eat meat then stick to Chicken and Turkey only…..Not Red Meat…..Mind I did have a goose at Xmas !