For the meat eaters still out there, you may be wondering how much is too much when it comes to your health.
You will have to weigh up the benefits and the harms.
Norman and Tegan take us through the recommendations, and the science to back them up.
References:
Tegan Taylor: So I've had a question for you, Norman…
Norman Swan: Yes? You've always got a question for me, and I get into a cold sweat when I hear those words, because God knows what's coming.
Tegan Taylor: I think this is an easy question. I want to know what your favourite legume is.
Norman Swan: Well, I like chickpeas but I like hummus and I eat vast quantities of hummus every week.
Tegan Taylor: Well, I was also going to say chickpeas because I have recently learned how to make falafels at home and they are so good, if I do say so myself.
Norman Swan: And when you make them yourself you realise how lousy falafels can be in restaurants.
Tegan Taylor: Yeah, but also you realise the reason they're so delicious is because they are deep fried. So much oil in them. Not a health food, but definitely delicious. Well, the reason I'm asking you about this, Norman, is because one of the questions that we've gotten a lot of recently is whether it's healthier to avoid meat altogether. I think we can all agree that there are some great meat alternatives. But the core question is, is it the healthiest diet to not eat meat at all?
Norman Swan: And that's the question on this week's What's That Rash?.
Tegan Taylor: So this week's question comes from Sharon who says she's been watching a few Netflix series on meat and the meat industry and they have her really worried about eating meat. Is it easier to avoid meat altogether, or is there a healthy amount we can eat?
Norman Swan: Good question, and I'm sure it's on everybody's lips. And there's something that we never talk about on What's That Rash? and that's the Mediterranean diet.
Tegan Taylor: The Mediterranean diet? Ding, ding, ding!
Norman Swan: But we'll focus on meat.
Tegan Taylor: Yeah, I think before we get too far into this discussion, I feel like there's a preface that's necessary here, which is that a lot of people have a lot of really good reasons for not eating meat at all, ethical reasons, environmental reasons and...
Norman Swan: Religious reasons.
Tegan Taylor: Exactly. And so that's fine. As a health show, I think we'll focus on the health reasons for and against any kind of meat eating. And so I suppose the place to start is the Australian dietary guidelines, because there is a big group of people who spend years and years figuring out at the population level what the most realistic healthy way for people to eat is. They don't say to not eat meat, but they do say to eat a lot less meat than I think the people who do eat meat eat.
Norman Swan: Yes, and that's because of the size of the serve. So I think that they say a maximum around seven servings of lean red meat is recommended. But they lump in other stuff as well; poultry, fish, eggs, nuts, and seeds, legumes, beans and so on, into the protein intake.
Tegan Taylor: I mean, the data that I'm looking at is from a couple of years ago now, I think it was 2020, and Australian meat consumption is a lot, like tens of kilos per person, poultry 40 kilos per person, this is across a year, 20 to 30 kilos of beef, veal and pig meat per year and about 15 kilos per person of fish. So a lot of meat. And that is obviously…not everyone in Australia eats meat, so a lot of people are probably having a lot more than that as well.
Norman Swan: Yes. And Sharon wasn't specific about which meats, so presumably she's talking about any meat versus a vegetarian diet. So let's talk about any meats. And then let's focus on red meat and by red meat we are talking about pork, beef, and we're talking about lamb basically.
Tegan Taylor: We'll talk a lot about the benefits of not eating meat. But from a dietary and health point of view, what are we getting from meat that is beneficial?
Norman Swan: Well, you're getting high quality protein, so you're getting a wide range of amino acids, including the essential amino acids. So in a meat meal, you don't have to work too hard to get a fairly complete protein diet. You might be getting too much protein, but you're getting a fairly complete protein diet in your nutrition. You're also getting iron in what's called the heme form, iron as sourced (sorry to be disgusting) from blood, essentially. And heme iron is better absorbed into your body than non heme iron. There's plenty of iron in vegetables, but it's less efficiently absorbed. So you're getting that. And you're getting zinc and you're getting B12.
Tegan Taylor: But those are things that you can get in varying quantities from non-meat sources.
Norman Swan: You certainly can.
Tegan Taylor: What about what we're getting from meat that isn't good for us?
Norman Swan: Well, then you've got to dissect the meat and meat products. And red meat is where the focus is, so let's talk about red meat for a while. I think there's little debate that processed red meat is not good for you because it has carcinogens in it, it has lot of salt. And the strongest relationship between red meat and something like colorectal cancer or bowel cancer is actually from the intake of processed meat.
Tegan Taylor: So you're talking about salami, bacon, ham, things that have been smoked, salted and have preservatives in them.
Norman Swan: Yeah, and a lot of sausages, not all sausages but a lot of sausages. And that's what the Meat and Livestock Corporation and others, the beef industry, argues, saying you're condemning lean red meat because of the harm done by processed meats. So there's an area of debate about, well, processed meats are not something to have a lot. There's nobody who thinks they're terribly good for you. I suppose the processed meat industry thinks they're all right for you, but I don't know. Versus lean red meat. And meat has become a bit leaner in some of the supermarket chains, they've tried to go to lower-fat varieties. The research that's been done suggests that there is a risk of both coronary heart disease and cancer from lean red meat consumption, it's just not as high as processed meat.
Tegan Taylor: When you say lean, are we talking like a certain percentage of fat? Is there a threshold for this?
Norman Swan: Well, first of all, you can breed cattle to be low in fat, but also that there's very low amounts of visible fat on the meat. So you're not getting a marbled meat, you're getting a meat that doesn't look as if it's got any fat in it at all.
Tegan Taylor: Is the fat in the meat the thing that's causing a health harm though, or is it more than that?
Norman Swan: Yes, and we've spoken about this before, because you can talk about the individual elements of a diet, but how you cook it is really important. So, for example, if you go to the Greek islands and look at how they cook lamb, for example, they are very popular, they cook lamb slowly, it's a 10-hour process, and they only have it maybe once a week. Now, lamb is very fatty. When we cook lean red meat, it will often be on a barbecue where you're burning it. And the faster you cook, the more likely you are to have carcinogenic compounds in the food from the burnt elements of it. And also some of the burnt caramelised elements have pro-ageing, pro-oxidant compounds on them. These are controversial. They've been well studied at the Baker Institute in Melbourne, and they're called advanced glycation end products. So in other words they're pro-oxidants, they speed up, if you like, internal rusting in the body. So how you cook your meat is also important.
Tegan Taylor: So red meat is the one that does seem to be linked to cancer. But you can cook fish and chicken in the same way.
Norman Swan: You can, and that's not particularly good either. I mean, the other element here is the nature of the fat on meat, and the nature of the fat on meat is that it's saturated fat. Unsaturated fats, unsaturated oils are the ones that you get from vegetable sources, although you also get them from fish. So the type of fat is really important. And that's a key element not to miss here is that there are a lot of saturated fats, and saturated fats are not good for your heart.
Tegan Taylor: What about non red meats? Fish is one that…we hear a lot about the health benefits of fish, and yet Australians do eat a lot less fish than they eat of other types of meat.
Norman Swan: There's pretty good evidence that if you have two meals a week of whole fish, that that is good for you and prevents coronary heart disease and may also have an anti-cancer effect. So fish consumption is good for you here. Now, coming back to Sharon's question, one of the important elements here is trade-offs. When you stop eating one kind of food, you've got to eat another. So what do you trade it off for? And that's actually quite critical because when people promoted the idea of a high fat diet being bad for us, this is maybe 30, 40 years ago, people went off fats all together, and they started eating carbohydrates. And that's not particularly good for you either and could increase the risk of diabetes, overweight and so on. And then they refined that, saying, look all fats are not bad for you, some fats are actually okay for you like monounsaturated fats like olive oil, polyunsaturated fats, such as you get in margarine and some vegetable sources.
But you when you say to people stop eating something, they've got to start eating something else. And it comes to Sharon's question, because she wasn't specific; does she stop all meats? Does she stop poultry, pork and only eat a vegetarian diet or a vegan diet where there's no products from animals whatsoever? So if you look at that trade-off, where you're going to…let's say just a vegetarian diet, where you eat eggs and you take dairy, and you compare that to a meat eating diet, then you do get a significant reduction in coronary heart disease over time.
A lot of that is observational data, particularly looking at Seventh Day Adventists, who eat a vegetarian diet, and they do live longer and have lower rates of coronary heart disease than others. Randomised trials in this area have not been very successful in proving this one way or the other, but the observational studies are fairly clear. There seems to be less of a benefit from a vegan diet. I'm often asked about that, is a vegan diet better than a vegetarian diet. The benefits when you look at these population studies seem to be lower, but they're still there compared to a meat-eating diet.
Tegan Taylor: But when we're talking about diet, there's so many different…this is where you can have a bit of fun epidemiologically, the nerd in me gets excited with these sorts of conversations because…
Norman Swan: You could be a pescatarian.
Tegan Taylor: Right, like there's actually lots of different things, and even within these big categories of how people eat, there's a lot of variation. And so that idea of an observational study where you're just basically being like 'you don't eat meat so let's have a look at you', there's so many other things that might be at play. And the big one, I guess, is what you're eating to be full and be nourished if you're not eating meat.
Norman Swan: Yes. An anecdote here, I know somebody who runs a very successful high-end restaurant in Melbourne, and he trains his waiting staff to take a dietary history from the customers because there's no menu, they just deliver the stuff to the table and the chef decides what you're going to eat, so they want to know the dietary preferences. And if somebody says they're vegan, he's trained them to actually delve into their veganism or their vegetarianism. In other words, some people say they're vegan but in fact occasionally they'll have some fish, they might even occasionally have some meat. People who say they're vegetarian might occasionally move beyond that, might even be more vegan at times than others. So he taught them to take this history carefully because it might mean that the restrictions in the kitchen are not as great as people thought. So people move in and out of diets, but if you are eating more plant food than meat, it's good for your health. You don't have to necessarily cut out meat altogether.
Tegan Taylor: This is the question that I wanted to come to because I'm always struck at how varied humans have been throughout history, throughout different parts of the world. We can actually survive on lots of different types of diets and it's going to vary from person to person.
Norman Swan: Well, yes. I mean, the Palaeolithic diet, such as it was, and, as I've said before on What's That Rash?, just be careful when you're talking about the Palaeolithic diet; in the Stone Age, life expectancy was around about 28, so be careful what you wish for. So the Palaeolithic diet often depended on where the humans or hominids were at that time. So we are incredibly adaptable. But where it seems to land is you don't have to eliminate meat altogether, but you probably should only have it once or twice a week. This is departing from the Australian guidelines, but when you look at the overall evidence, probably once or twice a week of red meat is about right. Try and take more of your protein in the form of legumes, for you and I it will be chickpeas, other people it will be lentils and chickpeas. And also fish and lean poultry.
Tegan Taylor: Sharon, send us an email and I'll send you my falafel recipe, it's real good.
Norman Swan: Shelby, our producer, hates it when we give out recipes, because it's never ending. We're still giving out my tiramisu recipe.
Tegan Taylor: Of course the email is thatrash@abc.net.au if you have a question that you want us to answer, or if you want any of the recipes in our little recipe card library, but it's also, Norman, where people have been sending in…and I haven't been allowed to look at these yet…so a couple of weeks ago, you told me…well, you retold me a riddle that I haven't been able to solve in my mind. I am led to believe that the answer to the riddle has landed in the inbox.
Norman Swan: Well, almost the answer to the riddle, but I'll stop your agony and today on What's That Rash? I'll give you the answer. So a few weeks ago we put up this brain riddle just to exercise your brains. Here's the riddle: A received B's arm through the post from C and was very pleased to receive it.
Tegan Taylor: I'm of two minds here, Norman, because part of me really, really wants to…I definitely want to know the answer, more than half. But there is a little part of me that cherished the idea that I would actually solve the riddle myself. And I feel like I've just got to grieve that for a moment.
Norman Swan: I think you're just going to have to grieve that for a moment. So yes, we've got the answer. It came initially from Patrick, but also Barbara and then John got the right answer as well, pretty much the right answer. So here's the story. A and C are shipwrecked on a desert island.
Tegan Taylor: Oh, okay.
Norman Swan: There's no food, they run out of coconuts and there's no food. And C happens to be a surgeon and says, 'Listen, A, I can cut off your arm and we can eat that. And then I'll show you how to do it, and I think you could get away with it with me helping you cut my arm off after yours.' And A says to C, 'Well, what happens if we're rescued in the meantime?' And C says, 'Okay, look, that's a fair question. To even it up, when we get back I'll cut my arm off and send it to you so that we're even-stevens.'
So sure enough, after A and C have consumed A's arm, they're rescued. And they don't live in the same city, they live at other ends of the world, and C gets home and says, 'Why should I have to cut off my arm?' So being a surgeon, he went into the morgue and found a corpse and cut off the arm and put it in the mail to A because the arm came from B, put it in the mail to A and he was very happy because he thought that C had evened it up. And I don't want to point out this to you, but we've just talked about this story in a program about red meat.
Tegan Taylor: Oh yuk. Oh man, I've been turning that riddle over in my mind ever since I think we took a little trip to Cradle Mountain for a hiking expedition. I don't know if it's a satisfying answer or not. How on earth did C get through customs with an arm in the post? I think the sniffer dogs would have found it.
Norman Swan: And here's a tip. That riddle is great for children who are around about 10 to 14 on a long trip, it keeps them going.
Tegan Taylor: Congratulations to Patrick and Barbara and John. Norman only has two arms, so only two of you will get a prize in the post at some stage soon.
Norman Swan: And we'll see you next week on What's That Rash?.
Tegan Taylor: See you then.