When our vegetarian ancestors started eating meat around two million years ago, it wasn't just because animals taste great, it was pure necessity. Climate change made many of the plants our ancestors relied on less available and meat bridged that gap. From the discovery of fire at the latest, meat became a staple of the human diet. But over the last few years eating meat has increasingly been associated with health risks like heart disease, certain cancers, and early death.
So how unhealthy is meat, really? In this video, we'll only talk about meat. Dairy products deserve a video of their own. Biologically, we need to eat for three reasons: for energy, to acquire materials to fabricate our cells, and to get special molecules that our bodies can't make themselves.
The energy and most of the materials come from the three macronutrients: fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Proteins are the most important resource for repairing and replenishing our cell structures. The special molecules are a large variety of vitamins and minerals we need to drive metabolic processes. Meat provides us with most of these things. It contains all essential amino acids our body needs and a lot of minerals like iron, zinc, and essential vitamins, some of which are barely found in plants like Vitamin B12.
Only one essential nutrient is missing in most of the meat we consume: vitamin C. It appears in almost all plants and supports our immune system as well as the development of connective tissues. After a few months without it, you'd get scurvy. But meat has another big advantage, it's high bioavailability. Some of the nutrients in meat are broken down faster and available quicker than those from plants. Spinach, for example, contains more iron than meat, but it's absorbed much slower and the body needs more energy to digest it. Several health benefits have also been observed in communities that rely solely on meat. The Inuit for example, are able to survive in extreme climate conditions thanks to a purely meat-based diet. Since they consume the whole animal including the organs, they get every single nutrient they need including vitamin C. So meat itself is definitely not dangerous for us. But its health effects vary, depending on how its prepared and what animal it comes from. When talking about meat in the Western world, we generally mean muscle tissues that have a high nutrient density but also lack some of the vitamins that make it possible to survive on meat alone. The most healthy animals to eat are probably fish. Fish contains polyunsaturated fatty acids like omega-3, which may lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases and support anti-inflammatory immune functions. As part of a balanced diet, fish can be eaten regularly without worries. Eating fish comes with its own bag of complications though, like overfishing and the destruction of the oceans. We'll talk about that in another blog. A close second is the most popular meat, chicken. It's regarded as the meat with the fewest health risks. The only negative health effect of poultry is a bit controversial: fat. Its high content of saturated fats is associated with a higher cholesterol level and cardiovascular disease.
But this idea has also been criticized by a large number of scientists arguing high cholesterol levels might be inherited and not caused by nutrition. So in general, if you want meat and are concerned about your health, go for chicken. Things start to get problematic with high intakes of red meats like beef, veal, pork, lamb, horse, and goat. A recently published study recommends for example a maximum of 23 grams of red meat per day which is a very small steak per week. However, large-scale meta-analysis studies have shown that eating 100 grams of red meat every day increases the risk of diabetes by 19%, of strokes by 11%, and of colorectal cancer by 17%.
This sounds alarming. But before we panic, let's have a look at how these studies were conducted. Because this brings us to the second big problem when trying to answer the question of whether meat is unhealthy or not. Most studies that linked health risks to eating red meat were case-control studies. Which means taking a group of people with a disease and classifying them by their eating habits. The more red meat they consume, the more likely they were to contract certain diseases. The problem is that it's very hard to eliminate other factors. People who eat less meat tend to live a healthier lifestyle in general. They tend to eat more vegetables and fruit and are less likely to smoke and drink alcohol. Most studies try to eliminate these factors, but it's extremely hard to make definitive statements. Things get worse when we look at processed meat though.
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