This morning my daughter and I stopped by our neighborhood butcher to buy something to grill tomorrow.  Arriving only 10 minutes before closing, we were absolutely astonished to discover that just a few packages of chicken remained, along with some knockwurst and hamburgers.  Not a single steak, roast, chop or rib. 

It seems odd, but we celebrate Memorial Day by eating meat.  It’s a meat lover’s holiday.  Is this a good thing?  Despite the U.S. dietary guidelines, which recommend eating less red and processed meat, I think eating meat is a fine thing.

Dr. Renata Micha, of the Harvard School of Public Health, would probably agree.  She published the results of a very interesting experiment in this month’s journal, Circulation.  Dr. Micha’s team contacted the authors of 20 previously published studies about the effects of eating meat (evaluating a total of 1 million adults in 10 countries on 4 continents), and asked them to go back and separate the results of their raw data into processed (smoked, cured or salted) and unprocessed meat.  All the meat contained similar amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol.  The researchers found that eating the equivalent of one hot dog, or 2 slices of deli meat, per day was associated with a 42% increase in the risk of heart disease, and a 19% increase in the risk of diabetes.  But eating twice as much unprocessed red meat was associated with neither.

It is important to note that they are not saying processed meat caused heart disease or diabetes here.  At this point, they are just saying that they saw an association.  This means it may be the processing, and not red meat itself, that is the problem.  Processed meats contain 4 times more sodium, which increases blood pressure, and 50% more preservatives (like nitrates) than unprocessed meat.  Nitrates promote insulin resistance and hardening of the arteries.  You can learn more about the Dr. Micha’s study here. 

This study and its not-so-surprising results demonstrate a fundamental change in nutrition research.  For a long time, researchers, nutritionists, and government analysts have grouped together various foods in ways that made it difficult to draw conclusions.  Given that they are studying nutrition, it seems to me like a serious oversight.

For example, last year another Harvard University study was published that examined the effects of 3 different diets on mouse blood vessels.  The researchers called the diets “low-carbohydrate, high protein (LCHP),” “standard chow diet (SC),” and “Western diet (WD).”  But they did not explain what they meant by LCHP.  They did not actually explain what they fed the mice.  Did the protein come from grass-fed beef, genetically modified soybeans, or canned cat food?  And what is an SC diet?   How much carbohydrate, protein and fat are “standard”?  What about the WD?  Did those mice get fried chicken, burgers, iceberg lettuce, soda pop and doughnuts?  Also, what do mice in the wild normally eat?  These are crucial questions if we are trying to draw conclusions from what the mice ate.

A second example comes from the nutrition labels on the packages at the grocery store.  In order to determine the amount of white flour or starch in a product, for example, I must add together the fiber and sugar, and subtract that sum from the total carbohydrates.  Determining the polyunsaturated fat content presents a similiar difficulty.  Well, I’m not going to let it worry me this weekend.  I’ll just be grateful that my cousin John came home safely from Vietnam, and then I’ll look forward to a dinner of barbecued chicken, homemade cole slaw and potato salad, and grilled onions, plus some new lettuce from our garden!