Is Red Meat Bad for You

 

Red meat can be shown to be healthy one week and stroke-inducing the next, according to research, so the general public frequently finds it difficult to keep up.

However, a sizable new review that was released on Monday aims to go beyond the most recent study by rating the quality of the information that is currently available on a variety of health-related topics.

To determine the degree to which a specific risk factor, such as smoking, is linked to a health outcome, such as lung cancer, the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has emerged as a global authority on health statistics, examined the body of research in 180 different fields.

Both the link between high blood pressure and heart disease and the link between smoking and lung cancer received the highest five-star ratings, indicating that the evidence is strong and unlikely to change in the future.

However, almost two thirds of the risk-outcome relationships only received one or two stars, indicating that the evidence supporting many pieces of widely accepted medical advice may be weaker than initially believed.

One star was given, indicating that there was "no evidence of an association," for instance, between consuming a lot of unprocessed red meat and having a stroke.

Two stars were assigned to the associations between red meat and colon cancer, breast cancer, ischaemic heart disease, and diabetes.

IHME director Christopher Murray, a senior author on several of the "Burden of Proof" studies that were published in Nature Medicine, expressed his surprise at the numerous diet risk-outcome relationships that are "relatively weak."

The meta-analysis, according to Murray, was motivated by worries that "everyone follows the latest published study" despite the fact that the findings frequently "swing from one end to the other."

The question the researchers asked after reviewing the body of prior research on the topics, Murray said.

The red meat research was "not that surprising," according to Duane Mellor, a dietician at Aston University in the UK, because it concentrated on unprocessed goods.

These papers did not address the fact that consumption of processed red meat, such as bacon and sausages, has typically been linked to a higher risk of disease.

The IHME stated that it intends to update its findings as new research is received in the hopes that the new tool will help the general public and policymakers make decisions.

Findings regarding other health connections, such as those involving alcohol, air pollution, and additional dietary factors, will also be made public soon.