Has eating meat become unfairly demonized as bad for your health?
In a new study from the University of Adelaide and elsewhere, researchers found eating meat still offers important benefits for overall human health and life expectancy.
They say humans have evolved and thrived over millions of years because of their significant consumption of meat.
In the study, the team broadly analyzed the correlations between meat-eating and life expectancy, and child mortality, at global and regional levels.
They examined the overall health effects of total meat consumption in 170+ countries around the world.
The researchers found that the consumption of energy from carbohydrate crops (grains and tubers) does not lead to greater life expectancy.
Total meat consumption correlates to greater life expectancy, independent of the competing effects of total calorie intake, economic affluence, urban advantages, and obesity.
The team says humans have adapted to meat-eating from the perspective of their more than two million years of evolution.
Meat of small and large animals provided optimal nutrition to our ancestors who developed genetic, physiological, and morphological adaptations to eating meat products and we have inherited those adaptations.
But with the strong development of nutrition science and economic affluence, studies in some populations in developed countries have associated meat-free (vegetarian and vegan) diets with improved health.
The team says this may not contradict the beneficial effect of meat consumption,” nutritionist on the study.
Today meat is still a major food component in the diets of many people around the world.
The findings are in line with other studies that show cereal-based foods have lower nutritional value than meat.
If you care about nutrition, please read studies about diet that may strongly prevent memory loss and dementia, and green diet that may strongly lower non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
For more information about nutrition, please see recent studies about food strongly linked to heart disease, and results showing why processed foods trigger chronic kidney disease.
The study is published in the International Journal of General Medicine and was conducted by Dr. Wenpeng You et al.
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