Reassessing Our Relationship with Meat: Nutritional Benefits and Health Risks
Throughout history, meat has been a crucial part of the human diet, evolving from a survival necessity to a dietary staple with the discovery of fire. While meat consumption has been linked to various health benefits, it's also associated with increased risks of heart disease, certain cancers, and other health issues. This raises the question: should meat still be a fundamental part of our diet given these risks?
Eating meat is very important biologically as they provide us with energy, help acquire material to fabricate our cells, and to provide up with nutrients that our bodies cannot produce on their own. Meats are a major source of proteins, and proteins are the most important resource for repairing and replenishing our cells. Meat provides energy from fat and carbohydrate, building materials from proteins, and special molecules such as vitamins and minerals.
Meat has the amino acids our body needs, vitamins such as vitamin B12, Zinc, and so on. In all the vitamins, meat lacks vitamin C but this is available in almost all plants and it is important for our health. Since we do not produce this nutrient in our body, we need to always have this in our body and when it is missing in our body, it leads to Scurvy. Compared to plant, the nutrients in meats are broken down faster than in plant, and available quicker for absorption than plant.
While meat isn't dangerous for humans, it can have certain health effects which can vary from one animal to another and how it is prepared. Meat consumption in our world has to do with muscle tissues and these tissues do not contain all the nutrients needed by the body. If we are to look at animals based on nutrition, it is better to consume fish as it contains polyunsaturated fatty acids such as Omega-3 that supports anti-inflammatory immune response. After fish, Chicken is the next animal that can be eaten with less health effects although it contains lots of saturated fat which is associated with cardiovascular diseases.
It is normal for steak lovers to start to criticize the hypothesis that meat can have health effects but then a meta analysis studies shows that 100g consumption of meat daily increases the risk of strokes by 11%, Colorectal cancer by 17% and diabetes by 19%. Personally, I would have considered the study as effective enough but this study was a case-control study were people of different diseases were gathered and questioned about their eating habit but this study didn't consider other factors such as eating other thing like vegetables, consuming alcoholic beverages, and smoking.
When we look at processed meat, it is another case entirely as these meats are processed with different chemicals such as addition of nitrates and nitrites to hotdog which can damage the DNA of our digestive system as well as lead to other diseases such as cancer. Talking about cancer, the WHO reviewed 800 studies within the period of 20 years and came to a conclusion that eating processed meat is associated with colorectal cancer. With this when it comes to cancer association, we can say that processed meat can be placed in the same category as plutonium, asbestos, and smoking based on causation.
We could say that too much of a good thing can be bad both red meat and processed meat. While meat is an integral and beneficial part of the human diet, its consumption is not without risks. The key may lie in moderation and informed choices. Opting for healthier types of meat like fish and chicken, limiting processed meat intake, and balancing meat consumption with plant-based foods could help mitigate these risks, allowing us to enjoy the benefits of meat while minimizing its potential health hazards.
Reference
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16990
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2022/10/24/apex-predators-for-2-5-million-years-early-humans-stood-atop-the-food-chain-eating-mostly-meat/
https://www.nature.com/news/polopoly_fs/1.19513!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/531139a.pdf
https://blog.oup.com/2012/01/sciwhys-why-do-we-eat-food/
https://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/biochemistry/biochemistry/amino-acid
https://www.unlockfood.ca/en/Articles/Vitamins-and-Minerals
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/scurvy/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15235152/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4171345/
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/fish-and-omega-3-fatty-acids#.WokeOmaZO3I
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/nutrition-basics/meat-poultry-and-fish-picking-healthy-proteins
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/fats-and-cholesterol/types-of-fat/
There have been a lot of research on Meat and its effect on human health especially with regards to its risk of causing cancer. My uncle usually tell us that he doesn't like red meat, he usually emphasize on white meat and fish more in his meal.
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It's a really interesting subject, and a subject where marketing and politics and even religion tend to obscure the actual data. I'm a data guy myself, so when the actual data is available, I trust the data over the papers or books.
A huge problem with nutritional science and the links it tend to make with disease is that RCTs tend to be too small and too riddled with regression to the mean effects to be of much value, while practicality forces these studies to use questionable surogate endpoints, and epidemiological data tends to have associations so small and so clustered and confounded to make things hardly any better. This appart from the facts that questionaire based epidemiology yields highly inacurate data, and that multi variate analysis often wildly adjusts the data without a solid causal model, or at least without a causal diagram published in the paper that could be independently validated or critisized.
Next to being a data guy, I write fiction, and reading books and even papers on nutrition, Ive been seeing a trend where the books and even papers are really strong on narative but really poor on the actual math. I often joke that nutritional science papers and books are my favourite subgenre of speculative fiction.
Let me give a huge example. The book The China Study is a book that is based on a large and very broud questionair based epidemiological study. The book makes claims about animal protein and animal foods in general being really bad for human health.
The data used to be publicly available, but was deleted, however the data is still available in internet archives, so a few years ago I looked at the actual data.
While the data was of pretty poor quality, there were many usefull fields en enough to do a simple cluster analysis of food stuff versus longevity, and so I did just that. And guess what? The foods most positively correlated with longevity were mostly animal sourced foods, with saturated fat being at the absolute top of the list and animal protein not being much below.
And realize the book was written by an actual scientist with decades of work in the field. A scientist writing a book that claims the absolute oposite of what tha actual data suggests, and I'm saying sugest, because as a data guy I can confidently say that the actual data is nowhere near good enough to make any actual causal claims.
And it doesn't end with individuals. Things like this are often orginized by doctors and scientists with strong ties to either extreme animal rights groups (like the PCRM that is basicly a branch of PETA), have been exposed as actualy countering real science from being published (the True Helath Initiative), or are linked to (people with known financial ties with) the sugar and/or plant based oil industry like the Eat Lancet mess. The more you look into the science, data, and the people involved in the studies and publications implicating animal sourced foods, the same mostly American faces pop up.
If however instead of looking at RCTs and epidemiological studies, you look at chemistry and bio chemistry, then you get a glimpse of a tiny bit of real science hidden under the narative. While unheated fats might not actually ever be bad for you, the same can't be said for heated cooking oils. Want to worry about fat consumption, don't worry about saturated fat, worry about aldehydes formed when deep frying in unsaturated fats. Want to worry about protein, don't worry about animal vs plant protein, worry about HCAs and AGEs formed in the browning process of your meat. And, yes, worry about nutrient deficiencies.
In short, the data does NOT justify any causal claims of meat, saturated fat or animal protein perse causing cancer or heart disease. The bio-chemistry and chemistry DO justify being concerned about curring and preparation of meat (and other foods). So it's not fish over chicken over red meat, its soup over grilled over deep fried, actually.