Hallelujah: It's Okay to Eat Red Meat Again

After years of being told that red meat is bad for us, settled scientists have reversed course on the settled science:

There are people in this country eating too much red meat. They should cut back. There are people eating too many carbs. They should cut back on those. There are also people eating too much fat, and the same advice applies to them, too. What’s getting harder to justify, though, is a focus on any one nutrient as a culprit for everyone.

I’ve written Upshot articles on how the strong warnings against salt and cholesterol are not well supported by evidence. But it’s possible that no food has been attacked as widely or as loudly in the past few decades as red meat. As with other bad guys in the food wars, the warnings against red meat are louder and more forceful than they need to be.

Americans are more overweight and obese than they pretty much have ever been. There’s also no question that we are eating more meat than in previous eras. But we’ve actually been reducing our red meat consumption for the last decade or so. This hasn’t resulted in a huge decrease in obesity rates or deaths from cardiovascular disease.

I remember when athletes trained on steak and eggs and not much else. But then the settled scientists got a hold of some fragmentary data, leapt to a conclusion, and made everybody carbo-load until Fat Nation came into being. So it turns out the science wasn’t settled after all.

It’s important to understand what “too much” really is. People in the highest consumption group of red meat had one to two servings a day. The people in the lowest group had about two servings per week. If you’re eating multiple servings of red meat a day, then, yes, you might want to cut back. I would wager that most people reading this aren’t eating that much. If you eat a couple of servings a week, then you’re most likely doing fine.

Back to the future! And this time, the science really is settled!