new evidence that red meat is harmful to health

[dwindley]

i just came across this article which talks about a form of sugar which is believed to be the reason red meat is bad for us but normal for other animals.

but then goes on to say that it can be healthy in the right amounts...

any thoughts?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healt ... -find.html
any thoughts?

[brimstoneSalad]

I haven't read that one. Thanks for the link!

They made a mistake here:

Now they have discovered that pork, beef and lamb contains a sugar which is naturally produced by other carnivores but not humans.

It should read:

Now they have discovered that pork, beef and lamb contains a sugar which is naturally produced by carnivores but not humans.

Humans are not carnivores.

But they probably should have just said "many other animals", since they're talking about rodents naturally producing it too.


The immune and inflammation response from meat has been a bit of a puzzler for a while, Neu5Gc is an interesting proposal. I've also heard bacterial endotoxins, which bioaccumulate, being a possible cause.


The researcher's response was pretty absurd though:

"Of course, moderate amounts of red meat can be a source of good nutrition for young people. We hope that our work will eventually lead the way to practical solutions for this catch-22."

It's not a catch-22, that's used for when a pre-requisite for something can only be fulfilled by something that inherently sabotages that thing. Like "in order to be healthy you have to get nutrients, but in order to get nutrients you have to eat something unhealthy which will prevent you from being healthy" - this is not such a case.
There are plenty of other things to eat, plenty of other sources of nutrition, and meat comes with plenty of other bad things; it's not a perfect food short of this sugar. There's no need to "fix" this problem, since meat isn't an efficient or healthy source of nutrition. He acts like it's impossible to just not eat it.

Now if beans had this problem, that would be something to look at maybe fixing, since they would be otherwise very healthy and they aren't full of artery clogging saturated fat, carnitine to fuel the heart damaging metabolic byproducts of gut bacteria, and carcinogenic creatine byproducts from cooking -- and they aren't destroying the environment due to inefficiency of cultivation and massive greenhouse gas emissions.

At a certain point, don't you have to look at something and decide it's more trouble to try to fix it than just choosing a better food to start with?