Red meat consumption associated with increased type 2 diabetes risk

People who eat just two servings of red meat per week may have an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to people who eat fewer servings, and the risk increases with greater consumption, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They also found that replacing red meat with healthy plant-based protein sources, such as nuts and legumes, or modest amounts of dairy foods, was associated with reduced risk of type 2 diabetes.

The study was published on Thursday, October 19, in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“Our findings strongly support dietary guidelines that recommend limiting the consumption of red meat, and this applies to both processed and unprocessed red meat,” said first author Xiao Gu, postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Nutrition.

While previous studies have found a link between red meat consumption and type 2 diabetes risk, this study, which analyzed a large number of type 2 diabetes cases among participants being followed for an extended period of years, adds a greater level of certainty about the association.

Type 2 diabetes rates are increasing rapidly in the U.S. and worldwide. This is concerning not only because the disease is a serious burden, but it also is a major risk factor for cardiovascular and kidney disease, cancer, and dementia.

For this study, the researchers analyzed health data from 216,695 participants from the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS), NHS II, and Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS). Diet was assessed with food frequency questionnaires every two to four years, for up to 36 years. During this time, more than 22,000 participants developed type 2 diabetes.

The researchers found that consumption of red meat, including processed and unprocessed red meat, was strongly associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Participants who ate the most red meat had a 62% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who ate the least. Every additional daily serving of processed red meat was associated with a 46% greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes and every additional daily serving of unprocessed red meat was associated with a 24% greater risk.

The researchers also estimated the potential effects of substituting one daily serving of red meat for another protein source. They found that substituting a serving of nuts and legumes was associated with a 30% lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and substituting a serving of dairy products was associated with a 22% lower risk.

“Given our findings and previous work by others, a limit of about one serving per week of red meat would be reasonable for people wishing to optimize their health and wellbeing,” said senior author Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition.

In addition to health benefits, swapping red meat for healthy plant protein sources would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, and provide other environmental benefits, according to the researchers.

The NHS, NHS II, and HPFS are supported by the National Institute of Health (grants UM1 CA186107, U01 CA176726, and U01 CA167552).

“Red meat intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in a prospective cohort study of US females and males,” Xiao Gu, Jean-Philippe Drouin-Chartier, Frank M. Sacks, Frank B. Hu, Bernard Rosner, Walter C. Willett, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, October 19, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2023.08.021

There are only three types of foods.

Proteins
Carbohydrates
Fats

That’s it.

Three.

1, 2, 3. Count ‘em.

The average adult human requires somewhere around 1,700 to 2,100 Calories (actually kCal if you want to be precise) a day to maintain their body mass, assuming a reasonably-sedentary lifestyle. (Most people have a sedentary lifestyle even if they work out 30 minutes a day three times a week; to be “lightly active” you need to be on your feet and actively moving three to four hours a day (e.g. you might qualify as a teacher) and work out daily, yes, 7 days a week, for at least a half-hour. To qualify as “active” you would need to perform daily exercise of about two hours and spend most of your working day performing some sort of physical activity. To qualify as very active you would have to run for an hour a day and perform physical labor for work (e.g. roofing, carpentry, etc.))

If you eat less you will lose weight. If you eat more you will gain weight.

That’s the simple part.

But life isn’t that simple.

Let’s say you wish to eat “mostly vegetables”, as is propounded by the fool up above and a whole lot of other people too.

How many vegetables do you have to eat?

by tickerguy

This is off a bag of brussels sprouts in my freezer. It’s an 18oz bag, which is about two large (cereal size) bowl fulls to the top. It says I get 45 calories per serving and there are six in the bag, or for one bowl full of sprouts, I get an entire 135 calories. Incidentally, I also get several times my daily Vitamin C requirement by eating that bowl.

But I would have to eat more than 12 bowls full of brussels sprouts over a day’s time to get my 1,700 minimum calories and that’s assuming I sit on my ass! God help me if I actually go out and run five or six miles and my body’s demand for fuel is up another thousand calories as a consequence!

Now I happen to like brussels sprouts, but I don’t like them that much. This, by the way, is pretty typical for most vegetables in terms of caloric content; spinach, broccoli, you name it they all wind up with about the same caloric content per unit of volume. If you actually try to satiate yourself on these foods you’re going to fail — hard.

What will you probably wind up eating if you follow the prescribed mantra? Lots of fast carbohydrate vegetables, like potatoes.

Metabolically when it comes to quickly-metabolized carbohydrates you may as well eat table sugar.

Don’t believe me. In fact, you’d be an idiot to believe me when you can prove whether I’m right or wrong for very little money and effort. Go to WalMart and buy a nice cheap glucose meter and some “starter” test strips (assuming you don’t have a diabetic friend who will let you use theirs.) Your investment in this little experiment, with your own body, will be about $20; most of those meters come with a “sample” set of strips (usually 20 or so) which will be more than enough for what you’re going to do. You’ll also need a box of lancets (yes, you have to poke your finger and no, you never re-use those) and some soap and water so you don’t give yourself an infection.

Sit at your kitchen table having not eaten anything (or drank anything containing sugars; water is safe of course) for at least 4 hours and then gobble up 1 cup of cooked potatoes. Eat nothing else (other than salt and/or pepper to taste for the ‘tater) and drink only water. Wash and then poke your finger, running a test at 0 (just before you eat), at 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes and one hour later. If you want to be ambitious do two more at 1:30 and 2:00 but you probably won’t need those to see what I’m talking about. Write all the data down and take a piece of graph paper and chart it. (While the formal definition of “fasting” blood sugar is 8 hours with no food 4 hours is enough for most people to get back to near normal; if your “pre-chow” number is over 110 or if you get a number over 180 at any time on this test get your ass to the Doc for a formal set of tests!)

The next day, again after four hours with no food of any sort or drinks containing sugar of any amount, take two tablespoons of ordinary table sugar. Eat it raw and chase it with a glass of water. Do the same tests.

Day three, same deal except this time take an 8oz package of cheese (e.g. a brick of cheddar, swiss, etc) and slice off 2-3oz of it. Chow that and repeat the test.

Let me know what you find out.

I assure you that you’re going to be surprised; a cup of potatoes has about twice the fast carbohydrate content of the two tablespoons of sugar and yet one cup of potatoes is nothing compared to what many of you eat every day! The cheese, on the other hand, has almost zero carbohydrate. And by the way, breads do the same damn thing those potatoes do. Try it if you don’t believe me; now you own the tool to check it on your own!

So where do you turn now that you understand what’s going on — and what you weren’t told before?

This is where you get in trouble and it’s why you’re fat.

You go into the store and you see “Low Fat” on labels. Go back up above and read again — there are only three foods; protein, carbohydrates and fats. If you have a food that is “Low Fat” then the fats had to have been replaced with something, and I will clue you in right now — it’s not protein as that (mostly) comes from animals! This means that what replaced the fat is carbohydrates and it is virtually a certainty that they are “fast” carbohydrates as well, especially if what you’re eating is or contains a liquid such as salad dressing, soup, a “quick meal” or similar.

That is why you fail and it is why you’re fat.

You’re eating things that make you fat because you think that a “low fat” food will help you lose weight.

It will in fact, most of the time, do the exact opposite.

Fats, especially saturated (animal) fats, don’t make you fat because they are absorbed in the gut slowly and do not stimulate an insulin response. They therefore leave you satiated for longer; simply put you don’t get hungry as quickly. Carbohydrates, specifically fast carbohydrates, make you fat because they stimulate an insulin response and when your blood sugar level crashes on the back side of that response you get hungry. It is very difficult to avoid eating when you are hungry!

So here’s what you are going to do:

You’re going to stop worrying about animal fats in particular and instead stop eating all fast carbohydrates.

You eat eggs (or an omelet; yes, cheese is fine) with bacon in the morning — not cereals and/or breads. Cook the omelet in either butter or part of the bacon fat. Reserve the excess fat from the bacon; do not throw it out. Drain it into a coffee mug and once it cools off a bit put it in the fridge; it will solidify and is perfectly fine like that for weeks at a time. (That, incidentally, is what saturated fats do; they typically don’t go rancid.) Now have your veggies for lunch but take a dollop of bacon fat out of the mug and put it in the bowl when you nuke ‘em in the microwave along with a bit of lemon pepper or seasoned salt. That both adds flavor and calories from said fat. You’ll get physically full from the brussels sprouts and satiated from the fat you consumed and since there will be no carb-induced insulin spike you also won’t get hungry two hours later and reach for the Doritos.

For dinner eat something that had a face and don’t trim the fat; eat it instead; if you want to include more vegetables that’s fine, provided they’re not starchy and are colorful (e.g. green, red, etc.) Salad? Sure, but use full fat dressing if you want some (e.g. oil and vinegar, balsamic, full-fat ranch, etc.)

For flavoring purposes use pepper, salt, seasoned salt (e.g. Lowrey’s or similar) and other spices. Enjoy them — they have no calories and produce no insulin response. If you want to freak out about salt go ahead but for nearly everyone it’s a non-issue; there is a small (very small!) percentage of the population that has a legitimate problem with sodium.

Do this for one week and I will tell you what will happen — you’ll lose 2-3 pounds immediately. Here’s the bad news — it’s (mostly) water, as when you stop eating carbs all the time your body needs less water to process your food and you***** the excess out. You need to run a 3,000 calorie deficit, more or less, to lose an actual pound of body mass that is not water. That’s a lot. Losing 1lb a week means running about a 500 calorie deficit a day, every day. The good news is that’s very doable if you’re not hungry all the time. If you keep this eating pattern up you’ll start to lose real weight by the third week or so and it will keep coming off until you reach a body mass that is natural for you, at which point the weight loss will stop. You won’t notice yourself eating more, but you will be — just enough to keep your metabolism in balance.

Your body knows how to do this all on its own just like it knows how to make your heart beat like it’s supposed to — you just have to quit sabotaging the metabolic mechanisms that have been with man for a couple hundred thousand years (and which we’ve only been trashing for the last 50 or so.)

Note that it’s nearly impossible to lose more than 2 lbs a week of actual body mass as your body will react if you try to cut your intake below about 1,200-1,500 calories a day by trimming its metabolic rate, thwarting what you’re trying to do. So don’t; starving yourself is bad news. On the flip side it’s also almost impossible to gain more than 2 lbs a week; attempting to do so simply results in you crapping out the excess calories and that’s usually very unpleasant. Yes, I know there are exceptions (e.g. extreme workout levels, extreme body building, etc) but we’re talking about ordinary people living ordinary lives here.

Here’s the good news: If you do this for a couple of weeks you’re going to start waking up and not be hungry, probably as you get somewhere into the second week. If you’re not hungry, why are you eating? Listen to your body; if you’re not hungry at breakfast wait until lunch; cook the bacon and take it with you, then eat that on or with the broccoli or brussels sprouts.

If you want a check and balance on what you’re eating it’s simple. Take that label up above; subtract the “dietary fiber” from the carbohydrate count per serving you consume and add it all up. Keep the total carbohydrate count you consume daily under 50.

It’s not possible to do this if you eat starchy things or sugars. It’s flatly not possible folks. There are four (grams) of carbohydrates in each teaspoon of sugar; if you put two in your coffee in the morning you’ve had a 20% of your total carbohydrates allowed and you haven’t eaten anything yet!

You also can’t have any sugared sodas or other drinks (including “sweet tea”.) One can of Coke is 39 grams of carbs, all sugar. That is, for all intents and purposes, all of your daily carbohydrate intake. You also can’t be drinking juices for the most part, or “smoothies” and similar; not only are they full of sugars (natural or not) but a juice is much more quickly absorbed than the raw fruit would be and it contains the sugar content from many of the fruits. As just one example one 8 oz cup of orange juice contains roughly four oranges; eating one orange is vastly preferable to drinking that juice!

Finally, eat no hydrogenated oils of any sort. If you see that word on a label don’t buy the product and if you already have it in your house throw it out. Those oils all contain transfats to some degree and they are extremely bad for you. If you like fried foods and eat out pester your restaurant and tell them you want them to fry in lard or tallow; they’ll probably look at you like you have three heads but I assure you that’s far better for you than the hydrogenated oils they are probably using. McDonalds, as just one example, used to fry in tallow before the idiots started running the asylum.

You know if you’re fat folks.

I just explained how not to be any more.

You decide.

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