The Actual Reason Meat Is Not Healthy
Last week, as Americans grappled with the prospect of presidential impeachment and the national capacity for surprise seemed fatally depleted, news came out that shook people to their core. It was about meat. Eating red and processed meat, the headlines declared, was no longer unhealthy. It seemed—at a glance—that a bad thing was now a good thing. The stories were based on a recently published analysis of existing evidence in which one group of researchers recommended that “adults continue their current levels of meat consumption.” This conclusion—which the journal that published the research called “guidelines”—was written by a group called NutriRECS. The group was formed recently, and has not previously made recommendations about eating meat. Some of its founders, however, published a similar article in 2016 saying that evidence was too weak to justify advising people to eat less sugar. Fox News said the new research was “reversing previous data,” and encouraged audiences to “go eat ...