Q: I've heard that eating meat isn't healthy. What makes it not healthy? How much meat is safe to eat?
A: Avoiding meat is no longer fringy business. With meat linked to everything from heart disease to cancer, many people have taken the plunge and gone vegetarian.
Several studies show that meat consumption, with its high amount of saturated fat and cholesterol, is positively correlated with heart disease in both men and women. People who eat meat daily have a 50% higher risk of developing heart disease compared to vegetarians. In fact, disease risk increases as both the length of time and frequency of meat consumption increases. Consequently, people who adopt a vegetarian diet early in life have a lower risk of disease than do people who wait until after age 50 to switch from meat to beans.
In all fairness to meat, it may not be the harmful effects of a t-bone steak per se, but the protective effects of other foods in the vegetarian diet that is the real issue. Studies on Seventh Day Adventists, a religious group with a high percentage of vegetarians and much lower cancer rate than found in the general public, have found that meat was not a significant factor in the development of certain types of cancer. However, these studies did find that people who ate lots of fruits, legumes, and vegetables were at much lower risk for certain cancers, probably because they simply didn't have as much room in their diets for other fattier foods.
