That last food flip-flop made big headlines last week. It was a "remarkable turnabout," "jarring," "stunning." How, it was asked, could seemingly bedrock nutrition advice turn on a dime?
The answer is that many of the nation's official nutrition recommendations — including the idea that red meat is a killer — have been based on a type of weak science that experts have unfortunately become accustomed to relying upon. Now that iffy science is being questioned. At stake are deeply entrenched ideas about healthy eating and trustworthy nutrition guidelines, and with many scientists invested professionally, and even financially, in the status quo, the fight over the science won't be pretty.
Red meat is a particularly contentious topic because people have such strong objections to eating meat for a variety of reasons: the environment, animal rights and even religion (Seventh-day Adventists advise against it).
Last week's news, however, goes a long way toward removing health effects from the list of reasons for favoring a vegetarian diet. The highly rigorous four-paper review of the science, in the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine journal, looked at all the research examining health and red meat and concluded that only "low- or very low-certainty" evidence existed to show that this meat causes any kind of disease — not cancer, not heart disease, not Type 2 diabetes. Eating red meat isn't killing us....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...
