Eating Red Meat Raises Your Mortality

January 22, 2018

ReferencesArchives Internal MedicinePNAS


 Imagine a study in which 500,000 people, aged 50-71, were followed for about 10 years with extensive questionnaires about food frequency. There were some 48,000 deaths in the men, 23,000 deaths in the women. This is a big study so should have validity. It was observational, not randomized, placebo controlled. They statistically controlled for age, education, marital status, family history of cancer (yes/no) (cancer mortality only), race, body mass index, smoking history, physical activity, energy intake, alcohol intake, vitamin supplement use, fruit consumption, vegetable consumption, and menopausal hormone therapy among women. The findings are pretty interesting.


Those who ate the most red meat had a 30% increased risk of dying. In women, those eating the most red meat were 36 percent more likely to die for any reason, 20 percent more likely from cancer and 50 percent more from heart disease. Men eating the most meat were 31 percent more likely to die for any reason, 22 percent more of cancer and 27 percent more from heart disease. 


On the first blush, one things it must be the fat, and that is one of the reasons given in the article. I want you to think about possibly other reasons. Here are a few. Ferritin. The more iron you consume, in the form of red meat, the higher your ferritin climbs. This has happened on Okinawa and there the mortality has risen sharply for cardiovascular disease and Alzheimers. Iron is a two edged sword. You need it badly if you are a young woman having babies every two years, our paleolithic past. But our iron absorption rate damages us badly when we get to menopause and stop losing iron through menstruation or babies. And men always have more iron. In fact, men live as much as 10 years less than women. Only 30% of that can be attributed to climbing ladders. A good portion of that is the excess mortality driven by the increased burden of ferritin in men, who never have a chance to lose it. The least Alzheimer's in the world centers on places with ferritin of 20. American men average over 200 – some are as high at 6-800 and don’t know it. 


 Another reason. Lectins. In America we feed our animals corn. You can trace the corn through the food supply because of it's mixture of carbon subtypes. The average American is 65% corn. The average European is 5%. Corn is loaded with lectins, proteins that bind to sugars and set off immune messages internally. You are not only what you eat, but what you ate, ate. When you eat a cow raised on GMO corn, or a chicken raised on GMO corn, you get the lectins from that GMO crop passed on to you. Lectins bind so tightly to sugars, and are pretty resistant to degradation, they survive the transfer. Corn makes cows fat, pigs fat, chickens fat and you fat. It's not just the calories in the grain, it's the hormonal effect of the lectins. American red meat is full of ferritin, full of lectins, full of hormones all at the trace level that has been blessed as safe. It's not safe. Eating red meat makes you die faster. 


Then there are the amino acids in meat.  That rabbit hole may be the real answer.  For another day.


www.What will work for me. I'm startled by this. It is changing my mind. The ketogenic diet can't be one of pure red meat. I've measured my ferritin and it was 160. I'm choosing salads much more now with traces of ocean raised fish. You should know your ferritin and get it down. You drop some 40 points every time you donate blood. Next week we will start a series on Lectins. 


 Pop Quiz  

  1. Eating red meat is good for you. T or F                        Answer: Way too complicated for T or F. You have to get B12 from red meat so we hav got eat a little. And women making babies need the iron. But men almost never need extra iron.
  2. If I cut down on red meat such that I'm at a serving a week, what will my mortality do compared to an every day kind of guy?                     Answer: Down 30%
  3. American's are composed of more corn based food that Europeans, by how much?                                                                Answer: We don't have a huge study but 65% to 5% is one data point, American to European. Yes, you are made of 65% corn protein or fat.
  4. Name another source of possible problems with American red meat?                   Answer: by eating so much corn, the lectins in corn are passed onto the person who eats them
  5. What are lectins?                Answer: proteins plants make to poison their predators. They attach to our feed animals meat and then we get them. They have many hormonal side effects. Read more next week.
 

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