Meat

I read about a study yesterday that investigated the eating habits of over half a million people over a number of years. This number of people gives you the ability to come up with some darn high power data, so the findings should be a bit more reliable than your latest diet fad (FLAXSEED OIL FOUND TO CURE CANCER!!!!).

What they found confirmed something we already kind of knew: white meat is healthier than red meat, processed meat is a no-no. What shocked me was the strength of the effect that was observed. Essentially, people were grouped into five groups according to how much of each kind of meat they consumed. The groups were then analyzed for differences in the overall chance of death, as well as the chance of death from cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Turns out that the ones that were in the highest group for red meat consumption had a roughly 30 % higher likelihood of dying during the observation period than those in the lowest group. 30 %! That's crazy. People who ate more white meat were actually LESS likely to die than those who ate less (bad news for vegetarians, I guess), but the effect was not as shockingly high.

So I went ahead and calculated from the numbers that those groups ate what would actually be the healthiest amount of meat to eat. Because "eat more white meat, less red meat" could mean a lot of things, depending on where you started. Here came the second surprise. According to the data in the study, my life expectancy will be highest if I eat about a pound of white meat per week, less than a quarter of a pound of red meat per week, and a whooping 156 g of processed meat PER YEAR. That's less than six ounces of processed meat PER YEAR. Bye bye bacon.

Oh, and guess which group I'm in at the moment...?

Whatever. Lentils for dinner today.

Anybody have a good recipe?