Does Red Meat Really Raise Risk For Type 2 Diabetes?

A closer look at the latest Harvard study fearmongering over red meat raises doubts about the final conclusions.

Harvard University published a groundbreaking study of nearly 217,000 participants last month that linked red meat to type 2 diabetes.

“Our findings strongly support dietary guidelines that recommend limiting the consumption of red meat, and this applies to both processed and unprocessed red meat,” said Xiao Gu, the paper’s first author.

The study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, according to a Harvard press release, “adds a greater level of certainty about the association” between red meat and diabetes.

Consumption of red meat, they found, was directly correlated with risk for type 2 diabetes. The findings drew headlines in nearly every major paper in America.

“Drop That Hot Dog If You Value Your Health,” headlined the Washington Post republishing an analysis from Bloomberg.

“Even a small amount of red meat can increase your diabetes risk,” read another headline in National Geographic.

“Eating red meat twice a week may increase type 2 diabetes risk, study finds,” titled coverage in The Guardian.

“Participants who ate the most red meat had a 62 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who ate the least,” Harvard reported. “Every additional daily serving of processed red meat was associated with a 46 percent greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes and every additional daily serving of unprocessed red meat was associated with a 24 percent greater risk.”

A closer look at the study fearmongering over red meat, however, raises doubts about the final conclusions.

Harvard researchers examined data from the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS), NHS II, and Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS). With 216,695 participants, diet was assessed through a series of food frequency questionnaires every two to four years for up to 36 years. More than 22,000 participants ultimately developed type 2 diabetes. In other words, the survey’s subjects simply reported what they ate every two to four years. Clinical researchers have a term for the kind of bias that ensues in surveys which rely on participants’ recollection of their diets: recall bias. Most people can’t remember what they had for lunch on any given day last week, let alone what they had for dinner every night two years ago.

Intuitively, the study’s conclusions also make no sense. Type 2 diabetes is the inability to handle glucose due to the cells’ insulin resistance. Red meat has no glucose, which is why high-quality beef and bacon are optimal proteins to reverse insulin resistance.

In her book, “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” nutrition journalist Nina Teicholz spent almost decade researching the science behind health authorities’ recommendations for a low-fat, meat restricted diet. Her findings were breathtaking.

“Almost nothing that we commonly believe today about fats generally and saturated fat in particular appears, upon close examination, to be accurate,” she wrote.

Teicholz traced the scientific evidence for the low-fat diet back to a collection of arrogant researchers who constructed a monolithic view of dietary fat ultimately endorsed by a corrupt food industry. The low-fat diet craze dominated American nutrition standards for generations and demonized red meat as the primary culprit in obesity and chronic disease. “The disturbing story of nutrition science over the course of the last half-century looks something like this:"

Scientists responding to the skyrocketing number of heart disease cases, which had gone from a mere handful in 1900 to being the leading cause of death by 1950, hypothesized that dietary fat, especially of the saturated kind (due to its effect on cholesterol), was to blame. This hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested. Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma. The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health. And the normally self-correcting mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging one’s own beliefs, was disabled.

The food industry went on to produce low-fat products of every kind while replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats such as those found in seed oils for ultra processed consumables. But if red meat consumption were truly the cause of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, then the world would have been forced to grapple with the epidemic of illness long before 1950. Red meat as a staple in the human diet is far from new. Our industrialized food supply is, and it’s killing the nation.

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