Meat is better for you than you think

Is the scent of a delicious roast dinner currently wafting from your oven, making you salivate? Will you feel just a smidge guilty as you tuck in?

Never mind the people trying Veganuary this month, all of us have been told that eating meat is bad. Not only for the planet, but for our health. Every bite of that brisket will raise your risk of cancer, heart disease and more. A second helping will send you to an early grave.

But will it? A growing body of research suggests that meat is a complex beast. Acres of difference stand between a high welfare, grass-fed sirloin steak and the impact on your body of a highly processed hot dog. The NHS advises that people who eat 90 grams of processed or red meat a day – equivalent to a couple of rashers of bacon – should cut down to 70 grams.

What’s clear is that, cooked with care and eaten selectively, meat may even boost your health. A recent report by the University of Edinburgh suggests that without better awareness of alternative sources of nutrients, the targets to reduce meat and dairy consumption by 20 per cent by 2035 might actually raise health risks, inadvertently exacerbating deficiencies in important minerals including selenium, iron and zinc.  

But ethics and environment aside, what do we really know about the impact that eating meat has on our health?

Why we shouldn’t give up on meat

Veganism and vegetarianism have become shorthand terms for healthier lifestyles, says Dr Wenpeng You, biomedicine researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. But after he and his team examined the overall health effects of meat consumption in 175 countries, taking into account factors including affluence, obesity and overall calorie consumption, their results, published in the International Journal of General Medicine last year, suggest that meat consumption does not send people to an early grave. In fact, it extends life expectancy.

Dr You is not hugely surprised. Humans, he suggests, are hardwired to eat animal protein. “Until about 12,000 years ago, there were not many sources of other nutrients that we could digest.”

In fact, meat may become an increasingly useful and convenient source of nutrition as we age, suggests Prof James Goodwin, director of science at the Brain Health Network and author of Supercharge Your Brain. “From middle age onwards, a process called sarcopenia, or muscle loss, progresses at 1-2 per cent a year.” If you want to counter this loss, 30 per cent of your food should be protein, he suggests.  

You could, of course, get all this protein from plants. It is just a lot more complicated. Nutritional therapist Lucy Miller says animal proteins are “complete” – meaning they contain all the amino acids our bodies need.

The odd BLT is OK but avoid processed meat when you can

There is strong evidence that processed meat – including ham, bacon, corned beef and some sausages – increases the risk of bowel cancer, says Dr Julie Sharp, head of health information at Cancer Research UK. “Nitrates and nitrites, which are added to processed meat to keep it fresh for longer, can form chemicals called N-nitroso chemicals (or NOCs) during digestion that can damage the cells in the bowel,” she explains.

Processed meats are also high in blood-pressure-raising sodium, says consultant cardiologist Dr Neil Srinivasan. Eating two servings a week may raise your risk of heart and circulatory diseases by 7 per cent.

The other bad news is that processed meats have also been linked to Type 2 diabetes, while a 2021 observational study correlated the consumption of 25g of processed meat a day to a 44 per cent increase in risk of dementia.