This may be pretty disturbing for all you meat lovers out there. A long-term study conducted by Harvard Medical School found that eating any type of red meat increases the risk of premature death. Examining the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for more that 20 years, researchers found that adding just one serving of unprocessed red meat correlated with a 13% higher risk of death. For processed meats, the overall risk increased by 20%. A majority of people in the study reported that they ate an average of at least one serving of meat per day.

Previous studies have linked eating red meat with diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Scientists can’t exactly figure out what makes red meat so dangerous, but some believe it’s do to the iron and saturated fat in beef, pork and lamb, the nitrates used to preserve them, and the chemicals created by high-temperature cooking. If you rely on red meat as a major source of your diet, then consider substituting those foods with safer alternatives (if you truly are worried about this study).

For example, the study says that replacing a serving of red meat with a serving of poultry, such as chicken, was linked with a 14% reduction in mortality risk. It’s the little things you can do in the short-term to potentially save you in the long-term. However, you should remember that it is hard to draw specific conclusions from a study like this because it involved a lot of food frequency questionnaires. The test subjects were asked to remember past meals in big detail so it’s hard to know the accuracy of such a study especially when it involves a lot of memory.

Source

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-red-meat-20120313,0,565423.story