If meat consumption is really that bad for us, why aren’t people doing anything about it?
This is the question posed by Professor John Potter, the internationally recognised public health researcher and former Chief Science Advisor to the Ministry of Health, in his recent editorial published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal).
If initial results from the largest nutrition study ever conducted (the on-going, two-decade-long, NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study that follows more than half a million people), haven’t already convinced you that meat consumption really is that bad for human health, then perhaps its latest results, published just this month, will persuade you. Conclusions drawn regarding the role of meat consumption and disease-specific mortality from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study (now at 7.5 million person-years of observation!) have now been expanded to include almost all major causes of chronic disease: consuming red and processed meat increases your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, liver disease, kidney disease, and lung disease! [1].
Still not convinced? Well Professor John Potter most definitely is, and for good reason too: the results from the Diet and Health Study are consistent with what is a very large and ever-growing body of scientific evidence [2,3]. To provide one additional example, the widely acclaimed Adventist Health Study found that meat-eaters (as compared to plant-based eaters) have higher risk of all-cause mortality and shorter life expectancies [4-6]