It is perhaps entirely fitting that I sit down to write this piece after feasting on my very favourite tea time treat of black and white pudding accompanied by heavily buttered crusty loaf.
Luckily my local butcher, Farrelly’s, just so happens to sell the best black and white pudding in Ireland, nay the world.
Fellow meat enthusiasts will by now be painfully aware of the constant whining of pseudo- environmentalists, and attempts to socially engineer us out of eating the good stuff in favour of creepy crawlies.
Much of the recent buzz around meat consumption has been focused on the farts of livestock, however there are attempts to scare us off meat over health concerns too.
Thankfully in a recent and welcome development, the Academy of Nutrition Sciences and World Cancer Research Fund have expressed their support for scientists from UCD, RCSI, and Queen’s University Belfast who recently had a letter published in The Lancet questioning the findings of a 2019 study related to red meat consumption.
The scientists rebuke the study’s claims that “a diet high in red meat” (like mine) “was reported to be responsible for 896,000 deaths”
They took issue with the findings by Global Burden of Disease which claimed that there was a ‘36-fold higher estimate of deaths attributable to red meat intake’.
As I wrote previously, there is plenty of evidence that our very civilization is thanks in part to the advent of widespread meat consumption.
The now very questionable study claimed that there was“sufficient evidence supporting the causal relationship of red meat intake with ischaemic heart disease, breast cancer, haemorrhagic stroke, and ischaemic stroke”.
The scientists critiquing the study say “by comparison with previous estimates” the published figures for “estimates of deaths attributable to unprocessed red meat intake have increased 36-fold”.
This increase was said to represent some 896,000 deaths.
However previously available research from 2017 attributed red meat consumption to only 25,000 deaths where of 15 ‘risk factors’ red meat consumption was reported as the “least important”.
The scientists further state that, “The 2018 World Cancer Research Fund’s Continuous Update Project Expert Report judged the evidence for a link between red meat intake and breast cancer to be limited and that no conclusion could be reached regarding a causal or protective relationship.”
They warned that if the public was led to believe that “moderate consumption of red meat as part of a healthy balanced diet is replaced by the message that any intake of red meat is harmful” there was likely to be an adverse effect on the public of “iron deficiency anaemia, sarcopenia, and child and maternal malnutrition”.
These conditions, they say “are already responsible for considerably greater global disease burdens than a diet high in red meat, particularly in low-income and middle income countries”.