Nuts to your red meat reproaches

Eating too much red meat may well be a bad move, but it's the knock-on effects of such research I worry about

Nicholas Lezard
The Guardian

The news that eating a lot of red meat regularly is bad for you in the long term is not exactly news; yet the recent announcement of a study by the Harvard School of Medicine, in which the health and diets of over 120,000 healthcare professionals were tracked over 28 years, seems to have made a bigger noise than usual.
True, the figures look scary: adding a single portion of red meat to one's daily diet, they say, increases the risk of dying by 13%. Make that processed red meat – bacon, say – and the figure rises to 20%.
Of course, the typical response to this is coloured by an understandable innumeracy. We are not, in the digested reports, being given the figures behind these percentages; so while the extremely casual reader may erroneously take away the information that eating a portion of bacon a day gives you a one in five chance of dying that very day, the reality is rather less alarming. It means that if 1,000 non-red-meat-eaters are going to die prematurely over a given period, then 1,130 red-meat-eaters will. Or 1,200 charcuterie fans.
This is, however, enough for some people. Lean meat can still be eaten as part of a healthy diet, says the British Heart Foundation, begrudgingly, although the Harvard researcher who addressed the World at One said that we had better not eat more than two or three portions of red meat a week.
One hesitates before piping up in the face of such informed opinion (although the survey does not seem to factor in the circumstances the meat was raised in, the other lifestyle habits of those surveyed, where they lived or any of the other variables that might have had some bearing on the data), and indeed the spectacle of defiant carnivores insisting on their rights is not, on the face of it, an edifying one. Nor is one inclined to take everything declared by the Meat Advisory Panel – a group of doctors funded by meat producers, who, possibly coincidentally, have taken issue with the study – at face value. But then again, there is something dispiriting about hearing the words "fish, chicken or nuts" brought together as a list of proteins sanctioned and blessed by the authorities as safe to eat. (It calls to mind, unfairly perhaps, the contents of a particularly uninspiring menu.)
The problem with all this is that – let's give Harvard the benefit of the doubt here, and assume their conclusions are correct – while it is all about helping us make more informed choices about what we eat, it is also the thin end of a very nasty wedge separating us from our own system of healthcare. Already there are NHS trusts making noises about barring treatment to smokers and the overweight (whose taxes, presumably, do not contribute to the exchequer in the same way slim non-smokers' do); it will not be long before the disapproving gaze falls upon imprudent eaters of red meat.
And there will be the usual depressing knock-on effects. One can, of course, still prepare and eat anything one likes, but the usual crew of cowardly cranks interested in not only, in George Orwell's resonant phrase, adding five years on to the life of their carcasses, but also inflicting their regime upon others, will be serving us either chicken, fish, or nuts at their dreary dinner parties, or, if we are really lucky, a very small portion of grilled red meat, with all the fat cut off. (Of course, a perfectly cooked chateaubriand steak has no fat on it, and should be finished off under the grill, but then it should also be slathered in unctuous, yolky Béarnaise sauce, and somehow I don't really see the good people of the British Heart Foundation endorsing such a dish.) Give me a stern vegetarian with strong social and ethical principles against the raising and eating of livestock any day of the week, rather than this meek and wowserish approach to eating, and to life.