Is Meat Good or Bad for you?

Hey everyone, welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions and this week's question is, Dr. Hyman, I see so many conflicting reports about meat. Some say that it has a place in our diets and other reports say it's causing all sorts of diseases and illness. I have friends who completely avoid it and other friends of mine who embrace meat as an everyday staple. I feel so confused. Can you put this topic to rest, is meat okay to eat? Well, this is an important question and for many meets an emotional topic as well as a medical topic. It's hard to separate the scientific facts about the health effects of meat from the ethical concerns or the environmental impact, which are all real. So what's the truth? Is meat good or bad? Will it cause heart disease and cancer and lead to a shorter life? Or is it the key to longevity, as it seemed to be for the Plains Indians who lived on buffalo and lived long and healthy lives. On the other hand, the Seventh-day Adventist, well, they're vegetarians and are also among the longest of people on the planet. So, what gives? Meat or veggies? Well, maybe it's the wrong question. The answer seems to be not is it the meat or the veggies, but it's the sugar and refined carbs that are part of the typical meat-eaters diet and our highly processed inflammatory diet that we really should be concerned with. There are so many questions about meat. Those concerned about meat raise questions about its saturated fat content and its cholesterol content, others about its potential to cause inflammation or cancer or type 2 diabetes. The answers to these questions are complex, and I know there are a lot of ethical concerns here as well, but today I want to focus on the question of animal protein in general and whether or not it negatively affects our health. Personally, I don't want to eat something for decades only to find out that it's harmful, or avoided for decades only to find out that it was actually good for me all along. Now, after reviewing most of the research on meat and health, I think we'll have a hard time answering the question about its health effects, good or bad. Why? Simply because good research on diet is very hard to do and no one has done really good studies on meat. All we can see are associations, not causes. The right type of studies would cost billions of dollars take decades and be almost impossible to do. So we have to make do with the limited data we have. The problem with a lot of the research on meat is that we're not studying the right groups of people. The researchers didn't study the Plains Indians living on buffalo and berries and roots and nuts. They studied the average American population who eats a highly processed, high sugar diet with very little fruits and vegetables, a population that smoked too much, exercised too little, drank too much alcohol. Now, those who ate less meat in the studies were healthier. Yeah, but why? Meat has been held in contempt for so long, and that is why health conscious people have reduced their consumption of it. It's called the healthy user effect. The real question is not, do feedlot, industrially produced meat eaters who also eat lots of refined sugar and carbs and very little fruits or veggies, who smoke and who overweight, and who don't exercise and who drink too much alcohol and don't take vitamins have more heart disease? We know that's true. The question we really want to know is whether grass-fed meat eaters, who also eats lots of healthy food and who don't smoke and who exercise and who take vitamins have more heart disease. Now, thankfully, some researchers have asked this question. Scientists studied 11,000 people. About 57% were meat eaters, omnivores, and 43% were vegetarians, but both groups were health conscious. In other words, meat eaters and vegetarians, these were people who shopped at the health food store, so they typically were healthier and more health conscious. Vegetarians lived on Coke and Doritos, and the meat eaters ate no vegetables and high carb processed foods. It would be hard to draw definitive conclusions about whether being a meat eater or a vegetarian is good or bad. But in this study, the researchers found that the overall rates of death were cut in half for both health conscious meat eaters and for vegetarians when compared to the average person eating a Western processed diet. no benefit was found for vegetarians or harm for meat eaters for the risk of heart disease, cancer, or death. That was impressive to me. Now, another study that was done by the National Institute of Health called the AARP Diet and Health Study did find a correlation of meat, heart disease, cancer, and death. They found that the meat eaters, on the whole, were a very unhealthy bunch. But was it really the meat? These people smoked more, they weighed more, they consumed an average of 800 more calories a day. they exercised less, they ate more sugar, they drank more alcohol, they ate fewer fruits and vegetables and less fiber, and they took fewer vitamins. Well, are you really surprised that they had more heart disease, cancer, and higher rates of death? Well, sadly, the only headline the media grabs is meat kills. The other problem with most meat studies is that the type of meat consumed is industrially raised meat from CAFOs. These are confined animal feeding operations. This industrial grain-fed meat is full of hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides, and more inflammatory omega-6 fats from corn, and less anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats. These population studies didn't include people eating only grass-fed meat without hormones, pesticides, or antibiotics, so we can't know the effect of that. There's also the concern that saturated fat in meat causes heart disease. But here's an interesting fact. The types of saturated fats in the blood that cause heart disease, stearic and palmitic acid, don't come from meat. They are produced by your liver when you eat sugar and carbs. That's right, when you eat sugar and carbs it produces saturated fat in your blood that causes heart disease. So the consensus is that in the absence of refined sugar and carbs and the presence of adequate omega-3 fats in your diet, saturated fat is really not a problem. In one interventional trial, researchers showed that even on a low-carb diet, higher in saturated fats, that blood levels of saturated fats were lower while eating more saturated fat because of the carb effect. Now, the same challenge applies for the concern that meat causes diabetes and cancer. The research proving these concerns also studied generally unhealthy people, all eating a highly processed diet. The surprising truth is that when you do randomized, control studies on what some call a Paleolithic diet, the diet more like our caveman ancestors ate, all the heart disease and the diabetes risk factors and the blood tests get better, not worse. This is a diet containing good quality fresh meat, eggs, lots of fruits and veggies, nuts and seeds, but no grains, no dairy, no beans, no processed food. So there are important factors to consider when eating meat. First, choose grass-fed, pasture raised organic meats. They're more expensive, but eat less of them. Stay away from processed meat like deli meats. These are the meats that have actually been proven to cause disease, illness, and cancer. And the way you prepare your meat is important as well. High temperature cooking like grilling, frying, smoking, or charring all the meat actually causes problems. It also happens when you cook fish or chicken that way. And all this leads to the production of compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, and HCA's which are called heterocyclic amines. These HCA's and PAHs have been shown to cause cancer in animal models and it's a good idea to reduce your exposure to these toxic compounds by changing your cooking methods for meat. But this applies to grains and veggies as well. You don't want to cook these foods to high temperatures either because they actually can cause the same problems. Focus on lower temperature cooking of meat and veggies including baked, roasted, poached and stewed. Now at the end of the day, the message on meat is pretty simple. Half the studies show it's a problem, half of them don't. The meat eaters as a whole are an unhealthy bunch, so it's probably not the meat, but the smoking, the sugar, the sedentary lifestyle that does them in. All things that are well proven to cause heart disease and cancer. In the absence of sugar and refined carbs, and in the presence of lots of high fiber fruits and veggies, meat actually seems like a health food, lowering inflammation and improving all the cardiovascular risk factors like cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar. But most importantly, whether or not you choose to eat meat, focus mostly on vegetables. Fill your plate with at least 75% phytonutrient-rich, colorful, non-starchy veggies. And use meat as a condiment, or as I like to say, a condiment. Now be sure to look out for my new book, Eat Fat, Get Thin, where I dive into the topic of fat and meat and give you a full rundown on what foods to avoid and what foods to embrace and how to prepare them. We're going to blow up the old myths about fat and about meat, so stay tuned. And if you like this video, be sure to share it with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter and submit your questions to DrHyman.com, and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you.