Do you really want to live forever?
Well, here is a newsflash: Eating red meat every day decreases your life expectancy. Thank you, doctors. A new study, which followed more than 500,000 middle-age and elderly people for 10 years, found that the meat eaters were 30 percent more likely to die over the course of the study. We have a reaction: They died happy. We also can’t help but marvel at the time and expense put into a study to tell people something they probably already knew and also probably don’t care about anyway. If you want to eat red meat, you are going to eat red meat. Or you can live a life of quiet desperation, picking at sprouts and hoping that you’ve earned a couple of extra years of hobbling around on your frail bones and shitting in your pants.
Then there is this asshole Barry M. Popkin, a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. He said, “This is a slam-dunk to say that, ‘Yes, indeed, if people want to be healthy and live longer, consume less red and processed meat.’ ” Since when are processed meat and red meat the same fucking thing?
When reached for comment The American Meat Institute’s James H. Hodges said, basically, “Fuck you, study.”
OK. In all fairness. The study encourages eating more chicken and white meat (pork doesn’t count in their book—sorry Pork Council and SaskPork—but fish is good). Nonetheless, it’s still patently absurd. Eating quality red meat in moderation is part of a healthy diet
The methodology of the study, as reported by the Washington Post was thus:
For the study, researchers analyzed data from 545,653 predominantly white volunteers, ages 50 to 71, participating in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study. In 1995, the subjects filled out detailed questionnaires about their diets, including meat consumption. Over the next 10 years, 47,976 men and 23,276 women died.
The eating habits of participants in the study were self-reported, and as such unreliable. How many of the 30 percent who died counted a Big Mac as red meat? Maybe the meat eaters were just more adventurous and engaged in more risky behavior in general — honestly, what sort of person doesn’t eat any red meat? — and that’s why they were more likely to die. Maybe older participants were more likely to eat meat. Also, if you are dumb enough to eat red meat every day, you deserve to die.
