Is Red Meat Giving People Diabetes?
The most contentious food online.
Red meat is one of the most contentious foods online. We love to hate it for pretty obvious reasons — there’s a certain moral righteousness aspect to it. The fact that red meat production is generally very harmful to our planet in a number of ways means that any story that shows it’s also unhealthy will get everyone very excited. There’s also the whole keto/carnivore movement, full of its own self-righteous steroid-taking hypocrites, and it’s always funny to see people like that taken down a peg or two.
The latest furore about red meat comes from a study conducted at the Harvard school of public health. According to the reporting, red meat in our diets may be “fuelling the type 2 diabetes epidemic” and that you can prevent diabetes simply by leaving red meat out of your diet.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), the story about red meat is much more complicated than that. We have known for some time that people who eat more red meat are less healthy in many ways than people who eat less of the stuff, but there’s no strong evidence that red meat causes OR prevents diabetes.
Let’s look at the science.
